Introduction

          I find the mechanism of recognizing and sorting different pieces of information and then going on to make decisions or predictions based on the information collected to be very interesting both in humans and in electronics. In the series of essays i will be posting this semester, I will be writing about Pattern recognition and classification, with an emphasis on the relevance of probability to creating a pattern recognition system.   Pattern recognition and classification is the act of taking in raw data and using a set of properties and features take an action on the data. As humans, our brains do this sort of classification everyday and every minute of our lives, from recognizing faces, sounds and voices. This cognitive task has been very crucial for our survival. Moving on, we seek to design models and systems that will be able to recognize and furthermore classify these patterns into different categories for further use. This enables us to design pattern recognition machines that have a variety of different applications from fingerprint identification, speech recognition to DNA sequence identification.