Cost Function

AKA: Loss Function.
Context:
- It can range from being a Linear Cost Function to being a Non-Linear Cost Function.
- It can rank decision values within a range of lower cost and higher cost.
- …
Example(s):
- a Cost Vector.
- an Economic Cost Function.
- a Parameter Fitting Loss Function, such as a learning loss function.
- …
Counter-Example(s):
- a Benefit Function.
See Cost Function Optimization, Cost-Sensitive Classification.

References

(Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cost_function Retrieved:2014-4-3.
- Cost function can refer to:
  - In economics, the cost curve, expressing production costs in terms of the amount produced
  - In mathematical optimization, the loss function, a function to be minimized
  - In artificial neural networks, the function to return a number representing how well the neural network performed to map training examples to correct output.

(Li & Link 2006) ⇒ Ling Li, and Hsuan-Tien Lin. (2006). “Ordinal Regression by Extended Binary Classification.” In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 (NIPS 2006).