18 August 2026

🔭Data Science: Supervised Learning (Just the Quotes)

"Consider any of the heuristics that people have come up with for supervised learning: avoid overfitting, prefer simpler to more complex models, boost your algorithm, bag it, etc. The no free lunch theorems say that all such heuristics fail as often" (appropriately weighted) as they succeed. This is true despite formal arguments some have offered trying to prove the validity of some of these heuristics." (David H Wolpert,The lack of a priori distinctions between learning algorithms", Neural Computation Vol. 8(7), 1996)

"A sub-area of machine learning concerned with how an agent ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of long-term reward. Reinforcement learning algorithms attempt to find a policy that maps states of the world to the actions the agent ought to take in those states. Differently from supervised learning, in this case there is no target value for each input pattern, only a reward based of how good or bad was the action taken by the agent in the existent environment." (Marley Vellasco et al,Hierarchical Neuro-Fuzzy Systems" Part II, Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, 2009)

"Supervised learning, or function approximation, is simply fitting data to a function of any variety.  […] Unsupervised learning involves figuring out what makes the data special. […] Reinforcement learning involves figuring out how to play a multistage game with rewards and payoffs. Think of it as the algorithms that optimize the life of something." (Matthew Kirk,Thoughtful Machine Learning", 2015)

"A major challenge in unsupervised learning is evaluating whether the algorithm learned something useful. Unsupervised learning algorithms are usually applied to data that does not contain any label information, so we don’t know what the right output should be. Therefore, it is very hard to say whether a model 'did well'. [...] As a consequence, unsupervised algorithms are used often in an exploratory setting, when a data scientist wants to understand the data better, rather than as part of a larger automatic system. Another common application for unsupervised algorithms is as a preprocessing step for supervised algorithms. Learning a new representation of the data can sometimes improve the accuracy of supervised algorithms, or can lead to reduced memory and time consumption." (Andreas C Müller & Sarah Guido, "Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: A Guide for Data Scientists", 2017)

"Gradient boosted decision trees are among the most powerful and widely used models for supervised learning. Their main drawback is that they require careful tuning of the parameters and may take a long time to train. Similarly to other tree-based models, the algorithm works well without scaling and on a mixture of binary and continuous features. As with other tree-based models, it also often does not work well on high-dimensional sparse data." (Andreas C Müller & Sarah Guido, "Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: A Guide for Data Scientists", 2017)

"A form of machine learning in which the goal is to identify regularities in the data. These regularities may include clusters of similar instances within the data or regularities between attributes. In contrast to supervised learning, in unsupervised learning no target attribute is defined in the data set." (John D Kelleher & Brendan Tierney,Data science", 2018)

"The premise of classification is simple: given a categorical target variable, learn patterns that exist between instances composed of independent variables and their relationship to the target. Because the target is given ahead of time, classification is said to be supervised machine learning because a model can be trained to minimize error between predicted and actual categories in the training data. Once a classification model is fit, it assigns categorical labels to new instances based on the patterns detected during training." (Benjamin Bengfort et al,Applied Text Analysis with Python: Enabling Language-Aware Data Products with Machine Learning", 2018)

"The label spreading algorithm is another semi-supervised shallow embedding algorithm.  It was built in order to overcome one big limitation of the label propagation method: the   initial labeling. Indeed, according to the label propagation algorithm, the initial labels cannot be modified in the training process and, in each iteration, they are forced to be equal to their original value. This constraint could generate incorrect results when the initial labeling is affected by errors or noise. As a consequence, the error will be propagated in all nodes of the input graph." (Aldo Marzullo et al, "Graph Machine Learning" 2nd Ed., 2025)

"The main difference between unsupervised and supervised embedding methods essentially lies in the task they attempt to solve. Indeed, if unsupervised shallow embedding algorithms try to learn a good graph, node, or edge representation in order to understand the underlying structure, the supervised algorithms try to find the best solution for a prediction task such as node classification, label prediction, or graph classification." (Aldo Marzullo et al, "Graph Machine Learning" 2nd Ed., 2025)

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