What is AI Classification?

At its core, classification is one of AI's most fundamental skills: the ability to sort. It's the digital equivalent of putting things into the right category based on what it has learned from past examples.

Example 1: The Spam Filter

The most classic example. An AI model is trained on thousands of emails labeled "Spam" or "Inbox." It learns the patterns of junk mail. When a new email arrives (the input), the model classifies it and sends it to the correct folder (the output).

Example 2: Image Recognition

The same concept applies to images. An AI is trained on a huge dataset of animal photos. When it sees a new image, it analyzes the patterns of pixels and classifies it as "Cat" or "Dog." This is fundamental to how self-driving cars identify pedestrians and traffic signs.

How Does The "Machine" Know?

The "Classification Model" isn't magic. It's a neural network that has learned to associate certain features (like specific words in an email or the shape of ears in a photo) with a specific category. It calculates the probability that an input belongs to each category and picks the most likely one.

A Foundational Skill

From medical diagnosis (classifying a scan as "cancerous" or "benign") to financial fraud detection (classifying a transaction as "legitimate" or "fraudulent"), classification is a simple but powerful AI task that drives countless real-world applications.