Classification rule

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Given a population whose members each belong to one of a number of different sets or classes, a classification rule or classifier is a procedure by which the elements of the population set are each predicted to belong to one of the classes.^[1] A perfect classification is one for which every element in the population is assigned to the class it really belongs to. The bayes classifier is the classifier which assigns classes optimally based on the known attributes (i.e. features or regressors) of the elements to be classified.

A special kind of classification rule is binary classification, for problems in which there are only two classes.