What type of machine learning task involves predicting a continuous output variable?

The task that involves predicting a continuous output variable is known as regression. Regression analysis is a statistical method that models the relationship between one or more independent variables and a dependent variable that is continuous in nature. For instance, predicting the price of a house based on features like size, location, and number of bedrooms is a typical example of regression, where the output—house price—can take on a wide range of continuous values.

This contrasts with classification tasks, where the goal is to categorize data into discrete classes or groups, such as identifying whether an email is spam or not. Clustering is a technique used to group similar data points without prior knowledge of groups, and association tasks aim to discover interesting relationships between variables in large databases. Each of these involves different types of outputs and methodologies, making regression distinctly focused on continuous predictions.