Letters

Happy Halloween! An Alternative AI Glossary

Welcome to this special Halloween issue of The Batch! In AI, we use many challenging technical terms. To help you keep things straight, I would like to offer some definitions that I definitely would not use.

Analytics DeepLearning.AI

28 Oct 2020 — 1 min read

Dear friends,

Welcome to this special Halloween issue of The Batch!

In AI, we use many challenging technical terms. To help you keep things straight, I would like to offer some definitions that I definitely would not use. I hope you’ll find this alternative AI glossary a breath of fresh scare:

Activation function: An incantation used to raise the dead
Dropout: A portal to another dimension that suddenly appears underfoot
Early stopping: When you’re tired of collecting candy and you go home to bed
Feature extraction: Getting a vampire’s fangs out of your neck
Greedy policy: Self-explanatory when trick-or-treating
Hinge loss: When the squeaky door falls off of a haunted house
Learning rate: How quickly werewolves realize they can’t break down your door but can climb through your window
Mini-batch: The amount of candy you have after early stopping
Overfit: When you’ve eaten so much Halloween candy you can’t button your clothes
Random forest: Where random witches live

Happy Halloween to all who celebrate it. Now let’s get this party started!

Keep learning,

Andrew

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Happy Halloween! An Alternative AI Glossary

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