juniorSupervised Learning
What is the difference between regression and classification?
Updated May 17, 2026
Short answer
Regression predicts continuous values; classification predicts discrete labels.
Deep explanation
Regression outputs numeric values like price or temperature, while classification assigns categories like spam/not spam. Different loss functions and evaluation metrics are used.
Real-world example
Regression: predicting salary; Classification: detecting fraud.
Common mistakes
- Using regression metrics for classification problems.
Follow-up questions
- Can classification output probabilities?
- Which is harder: regression or classification?