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Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by dvse on Sunday May 22, 2011 @10:18AM (#2573286)
As a quick rule of thumb would be to never trust anyone who claims "regression" is a separate topic from "classification". Oh yes, and in this case it is beyond awful.
Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by dantkz on Sunday May 22, 2011 @12:22PM (#2573582)
Why? I can think of another quick rule of thumb: never trust anyone who doesn't give explanation of the statements one claims.
Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by mturmon on Sunday May 22, 2011 @02:36PM (#2573883)
Looking at the four nodes below "regression" and those below "classification" in the OP, we see they are the same. The reason is that the same methods can often be used for both.

This is what the comment means when it says the division between regression and classification is often artificial (i.e., imposed by people who are concentrating on taxonomy).

Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by afterburner on Sunday May 22, 2011 @01:02PM (#2573650)
It's just a comment.
Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by lliiffee on Sunday May 22, 2011 @10:59AM (#2573375)
Can you explain why you feel that way?
Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by grammr on Sunday May 22, 2011 @01:58PM (#2573785)
He's making a fair point, which is that certain types of classification methods basically involve "fitting" a hyperplane to a dataset in such a way that the hyperplane divides the data into different classes [1]. In trivial cases, we may be able to do this in two dimensions, in which case the "hyperplane" is just a line bisecting two different classes of data. It's easy to see how this can be conceptualized as a type of regression.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine

Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by sesqu on Monday May 23, 2011 @10:12AM (#2575962)
Classification is regression with a discrete finite range.

Regression is often used to mean regression with infinite range, but especially since so many classification techniques are just searching for a regular partition of an infinite range, the distinction isn't made much anymore. Whether the rare techniques that are specifically over a discrete finite range still count as regression depends on who you ask - usually yes.

Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by dvse on Sunday May 22, 2011 @10:12PM (#2574793)
This is one of the first observations someone learning the subject would make.
Re:An Introduction to Data Mining by tel on Sunday May 22, 2011 @10:21PM (#2574800)
It's often practically true, though.

While every method I can think of differentiates itself at a lower level than regression/classification, and thus has interpretations in each, it's not always feasible or easy to make the "flip". Often times the approximation steps that make the algorithm tractable depend on the objective function.