Binary classification

A type of classification task that predicts one of two mutually exclusive classes:

• The positive class
• The negative class

For example, the following two machine learning models each perform binary classification:

• A model that determines whether email messages are spam (the positive class) or not spam (the negative class).
• A model that evaluates medical symptoms to determine whether a person has a particular disease (the positive class) or doesn’t have that disease (the negative class).

See also

• Multi-class classification
• Logistic regression and Classification threshold