Representing the target values for
classification
If there are only two classes, we typically use a single real
valued output that has target values of 1 for the “positive”
class and 0 (or sometimes -1) for the other class
For probabilistic class labels the target value can then
be the probability of the positive class and the output of
the model can also represent the probability the model
gives to the positive class.
If there are N classes we often use a vector of N target
values containing a single 1 for the correct class and zeros
elsewhere.
For probabilistic labels we can then use a vector of
class probabilities as the target vector.