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). Contrast with multi-class classification. See also logistic regression and classification threshold. See Classification in Machine Learning Crash Course for more information.

Practitioners refer to binary classification when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.