target
What It Means
A target function is the mathematical relationship that an AI system learns during training to make predictions or decisions. It's essentially the 'rule' the AI discovers by analyzing patterns in training data, which it then uses to process new, unseen data and generate outputs.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
The quality of the target function directly determines how well your AI system performs in production - a poor target function means unreliable predictions and potential business failures. Understanding target functions is crucial for evaluating AI model performance, explaining decisions to stakeholders, and ensuring the AI is learning the right patterns rather than biased or irrelevant correlations.
Real-World Example
An e-commerce company trains an AI to predict customer purchase likelihood. The target function might learn that customers who view products multiple times, add items to cart, and have previously made purchases above $50 have an 85% probability of buying within 24 hours - this learned relationship becomes the target function used to prioritize marketing efforts.
Common Confusion
People often confuse the target function with the training data itself or think it's something engineers manually program. In reality, the target function emerges from the AI's analysis of data patterns and isn't explicitly coded by humans.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare AI, the target function represents the clinical relationship the system learns to predict patient outcomes...
Finance: In finance, target functions are used to predict outcomes like credit default risk, fraud detection, or asset price move...
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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
"a method for solving a problem that an AI algorithm parses its training data to find. Once an algorithm finds its target function, that function can be used to predict results (predictive analysis). The function can then be used to find output data related to inputs for real problems where, unlike training sets, outputs are not included."Source: TechTarget_target_function
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