# What is the meaning of the [sgd] tag?

The tag has no usage information. I do not know what it is for, anybody knows, and can provide a wiki?

• Stochastic Gradient Descent? – Matthew Drury Nov 5 '17 at 18:30
• The tag seems to have been created by @avocado here. This is an example of our perennial problem w/ people using acronyms w/o defining them; "SVD" is never defined in either the question or the answer. – gung - Reinstate Monica Nov 5 '17 at 19:14
• @MatthewDrury, that seems to be the answer, why not make it an 'official' answer here, & create an excerpt for the tag? – gung - Reinstate Monica Nov 5 '17 at 19:17

I wrote the following wiki excerpt:

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a variant of gradient descent where only a small subset ("mini-batch") of training examples is used to compute the gradient on each iteration.

Feel free to improve.

It might make sense to create a synonym [stochastic-gradient-descent]$\to$.

Update: done.

• Please create the synonym! – kjetil b halvorsen Nov 6 '17 at 11:16
• @kjetilbhalvorsen, amoeba, I created the synonym here. – gung - Reinstate Monica Nov 6 '17 at 12:46
• @gung maybe we should swap the synonyms so the full form is the basic tag and sgd is a synonym? PS I created meta thread for this: stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5022/… – Tim Nov 6 '17 at 15:22
• That's potentially fine w/ me, @Tim. My 1st thought is that people who ask / answer about this seem to have preferred the short version, so we might take that into account. It might also be worth discussing. What do amoeba, Kjetil, & Matt think, eg? – gung - Reinstate Monica Nov 6 '17 at 15:28
• @kjetilbhalvorsen, see comments above. Do you have a preference? – gung - Reinstate Monica Nov 6 '17 at 15:28
• @gung I have no preference. – kjetil b halvorsen Nov 6 '17 at 15:30
• I'd prefer the full version be primary, and I'd prefer that was our general rule! – Matthew Drury Nov 6 '17 at 15:35