Binary classification

Binary classification is the task of, given a set of objects, classifying them into two groups on the basis of whether they have some property or not. Some typical binary classification tasks are

• medical testing to determine if a patient has certain disease or not (the classification property is the disease)
• quality control in factories; ie. deciding if a new product is good enough to be sold, or if it should be discarded (the classification property is being good enough)
• deciding whether a page or an article should be in the result set of a search not (the classification property is the relevance of the article - typically the presense of a certain word in it)