Pattern recognition

Identifying a signal from a field of what would otherwise be considered noise. The human brain and brains of other living animals are excellent at pattern recognition. In the field of artificial intelligence, computer scientists have developed methods for the recognition of patterns from data provided from various sensors, for example, the recognition of words from speech inputs. Perhaps even more importantly, pattern recognition includes visual patterns such as recognition of faces. It is also intrinsic to machine learning and relevant to data mining, which seeks to find patterns among masses of data. The act of classification of data implies pattern recognition based either on a priori knowledge or on statistical information extracted from the data itself. Techniques in statistics (cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling) and neural networks facilitate pattern recognition. Speech recognition, classification of text into categories (e.g. spam/non-spam e-mail messages), the automatic recognition of handwritten postal codes on postal envelopes, and the automatic recognition of faces are examples of current applications.