hyperparameter

Noun

1. A parameter of a prior (as distinguished from inferred parameters of the model for the underlying system under analysis).
   • this model has four hyperparameters
   • The exact interpretation of these hyperparameters becomes clearer once you have seen their role in the posterior and, hence, we defer a deeper discussion of prior elicitation until the next section. - 2003, Gary Koop,...

   Synonyms: superparameter

   Coordinate Terms: metaparameter parameter subparameter

2. A parameter whose value is set before the learning process begins.
   • The ideal learning algorithm just takes a dataset and outputs a function, without requiring hand tuning of hyperparameters. - 2016, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, chapter 11, in Deep Learning, MIT...
   • “Model behaviour is not determined by architecture, hyperparameters, or optimizer choices,” he said, referring to the technical difficulties of training a language model. “It’s determined by your dataset, nothing else....

   Coordinate Terms: metaparameter parameter subparameter