According to the AI-900 official study materials, regression is a type of supervised machine learning used to predict continuous numeric values. Predicting the animal population of an area involves estimating a numeric quantity, which makes regression the appropriate model type.
Microsoft Learn defines regression workloads as predicting real-valued outputs, such as:
* Forecasting sales or demand.
* Predicting housing prices.
* Estimating resource usage or population sizes.
In contrast:
* Classification predicts discrete categories (e.g., "cat" or "dog").
* Clustering groups data into similar clusters but doesn't produce numeric predictions.
Therefore, because the task requires predicting a numerical population size, the verified answer is C.
Regression, as per Microsoft's AI-900 official guidelines.