supervised learning

[neural!yann@att.att.com]

I entirely agree with Andy Barto when he says that unsupervised learning is a
special type of supervised learning where the objective function is hidden or
implicit. From the ALGORITHMIC point of view, the important thing is that we
just need to look for good supervised learning procedures.  Interesting
unsupervised procedures can usually be derived from supervised ones.  Look at
how back-prop can be stripped down to perform principal component analysis
(I am not saying that ALL unsupervisd procedures can be derived from
supervised  procedures).

Of course from the TASK point of view, it looks like there is a qualitative
difference between supervised and unsupervised learning, but they are just
different ways of using the same general principles. I don't think the
difference is relevant if you are interested in the general principles.

Yann