Task Type (ML) Metric

What is Task Type?

Task Type defines the kind of prediction problem:

Classification

• Predicts: Categories or classes
• Examples: Disease vs. healthy, responder vs. non-responder
• Metrics: Accuracy, F1 Score, ROC-AUC

Regression

• Predicts: Continuous numerical values
• Examples: Age, metabolite concentration, diversity score
• Metrics: MAE, MSE, R^2, Pearson/Spearman correlation

Choosing Task Type

• Automatic based on target variable type
• Discrete categories -> Classification
• Continuous numbers -> Regression

Related Terms

• Target Variable: What you're predicting
• Classification: Categorical prediction
• Regression: Continuous prediction