Machine Learning: A Critical Review of Classification Techniques

Abstract: Classification is a data mining (machine learning) technique used to predict group membership for data instances. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive review of different classification techniques in data mining. Evaluation of information, gathered almost everywhere in our day to day life can help devising some efficient and personalized strategies. The amount of information stored in modern databases makes manual analysis intractable. Classification is a well known datamining technique that tells the class of an unknown object. For this purpose, classification predicts categorical (discrete, unordered) labels. Many classification algorithms have been proposed by researchers in statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. In this paper, we have described various popular classification techniques in data mining. Keywords: Data Mining, Machine Learning, Prediction, Affinity Grouping, Clustering, Estimation and Visualization.