ABSTRACT
The purpose of this entry is to address supervised learning, the most common application of data mining technology for producing operational applications. It concerns the use of data mining methods to create detectors, classifiers, estimators, and other decision support tools for users operating in complicated environments. The aspect that distinguishes this genre from the others is that here we are looking through data for instances of known patterns: patterns that have been seen before. A representative sample of the patterns of each type to be classified is available or can be generated.
