Defining your problem

Many times, you'll see AI books and blogs talking about the distinct types of AI problems falling into the following categories:

• Supervised
• Unsupervised
• Semi-supervised
• Reinforcement

We did the same thing back in Chapter 1, Understanding the AI/ML Landscape, and you can find a flowchart of how to decide what category your situation falls into in Figure 7.1:

Figure 7.1 – Dataset heuristics for choosing your AI family

This is a good idea, but when you are starting with a problem, you aren't always thinking about it in terms of the problem type but more in terms of what solution you are trying to figure out.

We'll look at a few different and very common problem types in the following sections. They do not encompass every problem family that you will come across, but they will serve many of them.

Model problem types

The following are the four core problem types that we'll focus...