MFA Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the process of authenticating an identity into a computing system, application or service by providing at least two of the following authentication factors: The following list provides the most common MFA factor implemented today by security companies:
MSE in Machine Learning (ML) stands for Mean Squared Error and is an error calculation formula. MSE calculates the average value of the square power of the sum of differences between the original and predicted values in a dataset. It is similar to MAE, in that MSE is a calculation for the variance of residuals, ... Read more
The term multivariate generally refers to a property of a dataset having multiple variables being studied. In time series forecasting problems, multivariate refers to multiple variables being measured in given time series. The most common multivariate ML algorithm is VAR.
Neural network An artificial neural network (aka neural network) is a computational model which is employed by machine learning algorithms and is based on connected hierarchical functions. It simulates the neurons of the human brain.
NLP stands for natural language processing. A similar term is natural language understanding (NLU). Various artificial neural networks (ANN) are used to process natural language, including RNN and LLM neural networks.
NLTK is a natural language processing platform which can be utilized in Python applications to allow them to process human language data. Details about the NLTK platform can be found in its official website at: https://www.nltk.org/. An alternative toolkit for text tokenization (into sentences and words), for identifying parts of speech and stop words and ... Read more
NLU stands for natural language understanding. See NLP for details.
In machine learning, normalization is a statistical technique by which the data in a dataset are transformed to have values in a normal (Gaussian) distribution. For each value x in the dataset, its corresponding normalized value x' is calculated in the value range [0,1] as follows. Alternatively, there can be a mean normalization, with normalized ... Read more
NoSQL databases are also known as as non-SQL databases. They are different than relational (SQL) databases and do not feature the SQL model with rows and tables. The following types of NoSQL databases are available. Examples of NoSQL databases are the following:
NPU stands for Neural Processing Unit. It is another name for an AI accelerator.
NumPy is a Python package for scientific computing operations. The NumPy Python library includes a multidimensional array object, a series of derived objects as well as functions which apply processing actions on these objects. More details about NumPy features and documentation can be found at: https://numpy.org/learn/.
Operating system An operating system (OS) is system software which manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. The four layers which comprise human interaction with any computing system are user, application, operating system and hardware. Windows and Linux are the most prominent general-purpose operating systems. There are other specific-purpose ... Read more
Overfitting in machine learning is a problem in which the ML model fails to generalize well to unseen data because its predictions very tightly much the training data. An overfitting model has high variance and low bias. Overfitting is the other pole to underfitting. The desired situation between overfitting and underfitting is a good fit ... Read more
PaaS in Cloud Computing refers to Platform As A Service. This refers to any service which exposes application platform access without requirement for operating system administration.
Padding is the practice of adding pixels around an input image to preserve its dimensions, while enabling a convolutional layer in a CNN model to be the same size as the actual input.
Pandas is an open source library in Python. Pandas provides functions and tools to allow management of data structures and data analysis. Therefore Pandas library is particularly useful in data science, data engineering and machine learning. The official documentation of the pandas functions is available at: https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/index.html. Pydata community is a member of the NumFocus ... Read more
Parallelization is the technique of dividing up processing tasks among multiple processors to scale up the performance of a software environment. Parallel CPU, NPU and GPU architectures achieve much higher performance than legacy serial execution logic circuits.
Machine learning can be summarized as learning a function (f) that maps input variables (X) to output variables (Y), such as Y = f(x). An algorithm learns this target mapping function from training data. The form of the function is unknown, so our job as machine learning practitioners is to evaluate different machine learning algorithms ... Read more
In machine learning, PCA stands for Principal Component Analysis. PCA is used to tackle a known ML problem when a dataset has a large number of features, i.e. high dimensions, also known as the curse of dimensionality. The ML feature engineering engineering techniques available are classified into feature selection and feature extraction techniques. Dimensionality reduction ... Read more
A penetration test in cybersecurity is a test which uses security utilities to evaluate the levels of cybersecurity of an infrastructure and/or applications by executing an authorized attack on a number of systems.