4 ms·
That kind of sounds like normalisation in other contexts ("hey let's just say lightspeed is 1, simplifies the equations"), is that a fair analogy to make?
by vanderZwan 4y ago
That kind of sounds like normalisation in other contexts ("hey let's just say lightspeed is 1, simplifies the equations"), is that a fair analogy to make?
- nerdponx 4y agoNormalization of that kind is also used in machine learning and statistics, but it's not quite the same thing. A related technique is "standardization", where are you subtract the mean and divide by the standard deviation, yielding unitless quantities of "standard deviations away from the mean". However this encoding technique is a bit more like choosing 1 and 0 to represent Boolean values in C: it's convenient, it's easy to reason about, it's mathematically simpler than any other option, and there's no compelling reason to choose anything else anyway. For binary variables in particular, you sometimes see people using -1 and 1 instead of 0 and 1, to get symmetry around 0. I think this was mostly only used for encoding the labels/outputs of SVM models, where it's mathematically appealing as representing two sides of a hyperplane. There are a handful of other schemes for encoding "categorical" or "nominal" data of this kind, used in certain statistical applications such as the design and analysis of experiments. These encoding schemes are called contrasts in the stats literature, because they emphasize the differences (the "constrasts") between categories.