Continuous space and metrics
As most of this chapter's content will be dealing with trying to predict or optimize continuous variables, let's first understand how to measure the difference in a continuous space. Unless a drastically new discovery is made pretty soon, the space we live in is a three-dimensional Euclidian space. Whether we like it or not, this is the world we are mostly comfortable with today. We can completely specify our location with three continuous numbers. The difference in locations is usually measured by distance, or a metric, which is a function of a two arguments that returns a single positive real number. Naturally, the distance, , between X and Y should always be equal or smaller than the sum of distances between X
Get Scala:Applied Machine Learning now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
