Image by silviarita from Pixabay

Supervised and Unsupervised Learning For Kids

Machine Learning In Layman Terms

In this blog, I am trying to answer an interview question that I was asked during a data science interview.

An Interview question

Here is a very famous machine learning interview question:

What is the difference between supervised learning and unsupervised learning?

You can give an answer like this:

In supervised machine learning algorithms, we use labeled data, for example, classification of X-ray images as pneumonia, or not pneumonia.

In unsupervised machine learning, we don’t need to have labeled data, for example, clustering of customers to segments.

A Different Interview Question

What if the interviewer changes the question a little bit? The new question is not very different than the previous one. But the answer is quite different.

What is the difference between supervised learning and unsupervised learning? Explain to me as though I were a five-year-old.

You may need to change this answer. Because a five-year-old kid doesn’t know what labeled data is.
Let's try to answer this question using layman terms.