(Looking for new patterns)
Classification is a classic data mining technique based on machine learning.
Basically classification is used to classify each item in a set of data into one of predefined set of classes or groups.
Classification method makes use of mathematical techniques such as decision trees, linear programming, neural network and statistics.
In classification, we make the software that can learn how to classify the data items into groups.
For example, we can apply classification in application that
“given all past records of employees who left the company, predict which current employees are probably to leave in the future.”
In this case, we divide the employee’s records into two groups that are “leave” and “stay”. And then we can ask our data mining software to classify the employees into each group.