
For example, if we're interested in determining whether an image is best described as a landscape or as a house or as something else, then our model might accept an image as input and produce three numbers as output, each representing the probability of a single class.ĭuring training, we might put in an image of a landscape, and we hope that our model produces predictions that are close to the ground-truth class probabilities $y = (1.0, 0.0, 0.0)^T$. The definition may be formulated using the KullbackLeibler divergence, divergence of from (also known as the relative entropy of with respect to ). For multiclass classification problems, many online tutorials - and even François Chollets book Deep Learning with Python, which I think is one of the most intuitive books on deep learning with Keras - use categorical crossentropy for computing the loss value of your neural network. Categorical cross-entropy is used when true labels are one-hot encoded, for example, we have the following true values for 3-class classification problem 1,0,0, 0,1,0 and 0,0,1. Using the obtained Jacobian matrix, we will then compute the gradient of the categorical cross-entropy loss. The labels are one-hot encoded with 1 at the index of the correct label, and 0 everywhere else. In a multiclass classification problem over N classes, the class labels are 0, 1, 2 through N - 1. Let’s formalize the setting we’ll consider. By applying an elegant computational trick, we will make the derivation super short. Categorical Cross-Entropy Loss for Multiclass Classification. For example, if we have 3 classes (a,b,c) and let us say an input belongs to class b and c, then the label for Multi-class cross entropy can be represented as 0,1,1 but can’t be expressed in Sparse Multi-class. This is also known as the log loss (or logarithmic loss 3 or logistic loss ) 4 the terms 'log loss' and 'cross-entropy loss' are used. The cross-entropy of the distribution relative to a distribution over a given set is defined as follows:, where is the expected value operator with respect to the distribution. 9 In this short post, we are going to compute the Jacobian matrix of the softmax function. Whereas, Sparse categorical cross entropy can only be used when each input belongs to a single class only. The true probability is the true label, and the given distribution is the predicted value of the current model.

In this post, we'll focus on models that assume that classes are mutually exclusive. Cross-entropy can be used to define a loss function in machine learning and optimization.

When we develop a model for probabilistic classification, we aim to map the model's inputs to probabilistic predictions, and we often train our model by incrementally adjusting the model's parameters so that our predictions get closer and closer to ground-truth probabilities.
