Flashcards versus sorting a junk drawer
Learn with flashcards — question, answer, question, answer — and you're doing supervised learning, given the right labels. Dump out a junk drawer and group similar items with no labels at all, and that's unsupervised learning finding its own patterns.
Labels or no labels
Supervised learning trains on labeled examples (input → correct answer). Unsupervised learning finds structure in unlabeled data, such as clusters.
- Classification — predict a category (supervised)
- Regression — predict a number (supervised)
- Clustering — group similar items (unsupervised)