The goals of data mining can be classified into two tasks:
description and prediction, while the purpose of description is to
extract understandable patterns and associations from data, the
goal of prediction is to forecast one or more variables of interest.
The main difference between the two tasks is therefore the
presence of a response variable in the case of prediction
problems, if the response variable is continuous, such as blood
glucose (BG), the prediction task is said to be a regression
problem, whereas if the response variable is categorical, such as
hypertension (taking the values yes or no), the task is said to be
a classification problem.