The Loss: Defining What Matters

3 min
Audience
ages 10–15
Duration
30 to 40 min
Adventure
3/8
Badge to earn
Criteria Designer

Today's mission

Compare two loss functions and show that choosing a loss means choosing which errors will guide learning.

Proof of success: explain "The loss: defining what matters", complete "Two Referees, Two Rankings" and name the limit of the analogy.

The story

In an imaginary city, Camille predicts the number of bicycles at a station. Two days have errors of 2 and 10 bikes. MAE averages the distances; MSE squares the errors and gives much more weight to the error of 10. No calculation is universally "fair". Before training, the team must link the loss to real consequences and keep readable metrics for evaluation.

Preview — the rest of the lesson is for enrolled readers.

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This lesson is part of the “How the Network Learns” module

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