1. Different types of learning

Let's start by recalling how supervised learning compares with other forms of machine learning and data processing. We generally distinguish three forms of machine learning: supervised learning, reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning.

Supervised learning involves learning a function f:x→y = f(x) from a database consisting of a large number of example pairs (x _i ,y _i ). The development of deep learning, i.e. software using multi-layer neural networks, has enabled this form of learning to achieve spectacular success in recent years in image analysis, speech recognition and natural language processing