Lecture 3 | Loss Functions and Optimization

Lecture 3 continues our discussion of linear classifiers. We introduce the idea of a loss function to quantify our unhappiness with a model’s predictions, and discuss two commonly used loss functions for image classification: the multiclass SVM loss and the multinomial logistic regression loss. We introduce the idea of regularization as a mechanism to fight overfitting, with weight decay as a concrete example. We introduce the idea of optimization and the stochastic gradient descent algorithm. We also briefly discuss the use of feature representations in computer vision.