Letters used to denote examples and features - are these standard across the industry and academia?

Course Q&A Machine Learning Specialization Supervised ML: Regression and Classification
1

As per the videos in this course, the letter n is used to denote the number of features and m to denote the number of examples.

Elsewhere on the internet, I’ve seen the letter n denotes the number of examples and m denotes the number of features.

Is there a standard? Why not? I’m curious because lack of it can be confusing to readers, isn’t it?

2

If you need a reason for using m as the number of samples and n as the number of features, you may take a look at this post.

I think the key to understand the meaning of symbols is to read the definitions carefully, and if definitions are not provided, ask the author.

Raymond

1 Like
3

Thanks much for the immediate response…very much appreciated!

BTW, I think I’ve been tagging my posts MLS Course-2. I think it should be MLS Course-1.

4

No problem. I have moved it to course 1 week 1.