Is there a difference between "classification" and "labeling"? Until recently, I thought that "labeling" and "classification" are synonyms. But when I started another question about terminology in computer vision I thought about it: Is there a difference between "labeling" and "classification"?

I thought that the "class" is the concept you want to detect and "label" is what you assign to data. So the "class" is a concept which leads to the data and "label" is only the name. Hence "labeling" would be the same as "classification" as both want to make a statement about the underlying class which lead to the data.

Articles

A quick search via Google Scholar revealed that some articles use both terms in the title:


Markus Eich, Malgorzata Dabrowska, and Frank Kirchner: "Semantic Labeling: Classification of 3D Entities Based on Spatial Feature Descriptors"
Chunlin Li, Dmitry B. Goldgof, and Lawrence 0. Hall: "Knowledge-based classification and tissue labeling of MR images of human brain"
Ray Blanchard: "The classification and labeling of nonhomosexual gender dysphorias" - another research area but probably it is the same difference between the two words?


So I guess there is a difference between "labeling" and "classification". What is the difference?

Google N-Gram



classification seems to be a much boarder term.
Totally disagree with @Derek Janni. Be careful about notation however you should not get lost in terminology. Those papers you mentioned used the term "labeling" literally but in Machine Learning/Data Mining community, labeling is the process of preparing data for supervised learning (classification)! It has nothing to do with the ML task!

Those papers used the term to show that after supervised learning they can recognize different labels of different objects so they used the term labeling but you probably can not find in any literature that they use these two terms as synonyms.