{"id":85,"date":"2005-06-08T09:15:38","date_gmt":"2005-06-08T15:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=85"},"modified":"2006-03-22T23:34:41","modified_gmt":"2006-03-23T05:34:41","slug":"question-when-is-the-right-time-to-insert-the-loss-function","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=85","title":{"rendered":"Question: “When is the right time to insert the loss function?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hal asks<\/a> a very good question: “When is the right time to insert the loss function?” In particular, should it be used at testing time or at training time?<\/p>\n

When the world imposes a loss on us, the standard Bayesian recipe is to predict the (conditional) probability of each possibility and then choose the possibility which minimizes the expected loss. In contrast, as the confusion<\/a> over “loss = money lost” or “loss = the thing you optimize” might indicate, many people ignore the Bayesian approach and simply optimize their loss (or a close proxy for their loss) over the representation on the training set.<\/p>\n

The best answer I can give is “it’s unclear, but I prefer optimizing the loss at training time”. My experience is that optimizing the loss in the most direct manner possible typically yields best performance. This question is related to a basic principle which both Yann LeCun<\/a>(applied) and Vladimir Vapnik<\/a>(theoretical) advocate: “solve the simplest prediction problem that solves the problem”. (One difficulty with this principle is that ‘simplest’ is difficult to define in a satisfying way.)<\/p>\n

One reason why it’s unclear is that optimizing an arbitrary loss is not an easy thing for a learning algorithm to cope with. Learning reductions<\/a> (which I am a big fan of) give a mechanism for doing this, but they are new and relatively untried.<\/p>\n

Drew Bagnell adds: Another approach to integrating loss functions into learning is to try to re-derive ideas about probability theory appropriate for other loss functions. For instance, Peter Grunwald and A.P. Dawid present a variant on maximum entropy learning<\/a>. Unfortunately, it’s even less clear how often these approaches lead to efficient algorithms. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hal asks a very good question: “When is the right time to insert the loss function?” In particular, should it be used at testing time or at training time? When the world imposes a loss on us, the standard Bayesian recipe is to predict the (conditional) probability of each possibility and then choose the possibility … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Question: “When is the right time to insert the loss function?””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bayesian","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}