4 ms·
As a physicist, I always found it funny that in ML people renamed 'the angle between vectors' into something as fancy-feeling as 'cosine similarity'.
by frotaur 2y ago
As a physicist, I always found it funny that in ML people renamed 'the angle between vectors' into something as fancy-feeling as 'cosine similarity'.
- esafak 2y agohttps://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/translating-between-statistics-and-machine-learning/ https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/translating-between-statis...
- jesse__ 2y agoI have a feeling it might be because the dot product of two unit length vectors is equal to the cosine of the angle between them.. but that's just a wild guess
- raverbashing 2y agoAs an engineer I find it funny when physicists (and general ML bros) don't know about linear algebra concepts
- frotaur 2y agohuh? This is just a funny joke on the way its named, what made you think I don't know about dot products ?
- raverbashing 2y agoIt could be a joke, but the way you wrote it makes it sound like you didn't know it > in ML people renamed 'the angle between vectors' into something as fancy-feeling as 'cosine similarity'. Since cosine similarity is a name derived from linear algebra
- Lerc 2y agoIt sounds pretentious, but I think it comes from having multiple ways to compare things for similarity. Using the word similarity says what you are using the angle for. Angle similarity might work just as well until someone comes up with another angle based calculation. Cosine Similarity becomes a specific meaning indicating how it's caclulated and why it's calculated. If you really wanted to be pretentious you could invent a Dimension Insensitive Euclidean Metric and call it DIEM to make it sound like you are putting some Latin into your papers.
- Ultimatt 2y agoI think the point is they're often doing it on things that aren't strictly vectors by definition, as in the physics sense, rather just some sack of stuff organised like they might be a vector and assuming its valid to compare angles because its just something numerically without much bias that does the job.
- gpderetta 2y agoIt is used as a distance function, so the important thing it is not that it is an angle, but that it is a similarity function. And I think today it is preferred to call it "similarity" instead of "distance" because it is not a true distance function (15 years ago we called it "cosine distance").