What is a label or target variable?

A label (also called the target variable or dependent variable) is the output value that a supervised model is trained to predict. In a classification task, labels are discrete categories (e.g., "cat" or "dog"). In a regression task, labels are continuous values (e.g., house price in dollars). The model learns to map input features to the correct label by minimizing a loss function that measures the difference between predicted and actual labels.