instance
What It Means
An instance is a single, specific example or occurrence of something in your data or AI system. Think of it as one individual record, case, or data point that your AI model processes - like one customer profile, one transaction, or one email that needs to be classified.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
Every AI model's performance depends on the quality and quantity of instances in your training data - poor instances lead to biased or inaccurate models. Understanding instances is crucial for data governance, model validation, and explaining AI decisions to regulators or stakeholders, especially when specific instances drive business outcomes.
Real-World Example
In a fraud detection system, each credit card transaction is an instance containing data like amount, merchant, location, and time. The AI model analyzes thousands of these transaction instances to learn patterns, then evaluates new transaction instances in real-time to flag potential fraud.
Common Confusion
People often confuse 'instance' with the entire dataset, but an instance is just one single row or record within that dataset. It's also confused with 'model instance' which refers to a deployed copy of an AI model, not the data it processes.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare AI, an instance represents a single patient record, medical image, lab result, or clinical encounter that ...
Finance: In finance AI, an instance represents a single data record used for model training or prediction, such as one loan appli...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"Discrete, bounded thing with an intrinsic, immutable, and unique identity. Individual occurrence of a type"Source: IEEE_Soft_Vocab
"A single object of the world from which a model will be learned, or on which a model will be used (e.g., for prediction)."Source: Kohavi,_Ron
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