Talk:Winnow (algorithm)

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Removed the "insufficient context" tag

The tag was placed on 2007-10-29T16:33:23 by user Kallerdis, but the article is much improved since then. I think it does provide enough context. -Pgan002 (talk) 18:31, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is that update procedure correct?

The text specifies the update procedure as:

If an example is correctly classified, do nothing.
If an example is predicted to be 1 but the correct result was 0, all of the weights involved in the mistake are set to zero (demotion step).
If an example is predicted to be 0 but the correct result was 1, all of the weights involved in the mistake are multiplied by $\alpha$ (promotion step).

Step 2 moves weights to zero, and neither of the other steps changes any weight that is zero. Because of that, I fear that this will too easily migrate towards an all-zero weights vector.

So, either explain why that will not happen, or adjust the description.