Cost function (machine learning)

Last revised by Matt Adams on 12 May 2019

A cost function is a mechanism utilised in supervised machine learning, the cost function returns the error between predicted outcomes compared with the actual outcomes. The aim of supervised machine learning is to minimise the overall cost, thus optimising the correlation of the model to the system that it is attempting to represent.

NB loss function is defined as the error for one sample, whereas the cost function is the average loss across a number of samples in a given dataset.

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