AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Explanation

Correct Answer: C) Supervised Learning

Why Supervised Learning is the best approach:

1. Labeled Data Availability: The problem states that the provider has "millions of examples of emails already tagged accordingly." This means they have a labeled dataset where each email is already classified as spam or not spam. Supervised learning algorithms require precisely this type of labeled training data.

2. Classification Task: Spam detection is a classic binary classification problem - each email needs to be classified into one of two categories (spam or not spam). Supervised learning algorithms like logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, and neural networks are specifically designed for such classification tasks.

3. How Supervised Learning Works:

   • The algorithm learns patterns from the labeled training data

   • It identifies features that distinguish spam from legitimate emails

   • Once trained, it can predict whether new, unseen emails are spam or not

Why the other options are incorrect:

• A) Unsupervised Learning: This approach works with unlabeled data to discover patterns, clusters, or structures. Since we already have labeled data, unsupervised learning would not leverage this valuable information.

• B) Reinforcement Learning: This involves an agent learning through trial and error by interacting with an environment and receiving rewards/penalties. It's typically used for sequential decision-making problems (like game playing or robotics), not for static classification tasks.

• D) Clustering: This is actually a type of unsupervised learning (mentioned in option A) where data is grouped into clusters based on similarity. It wouldn't use the existing labels and wouldn't directly solve the classification problem.

Real-world Application:

Email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail use supervised learning algorithms trained on millions of labeled emails to build their spam filters. The more labeled data available, the better the spam detection model becomes.