📚 Learning Guide
Classification Summary
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If a classification model consistently misclassifies instances from a particular class, which of the following is the most likely underlying cause related to the loss function used in training?

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Choose the Best Answer

A

The loss function does not penalize false negatives effectively for that class.

B

The model has too many parameters leading to overfitting.

C

The data for that class is not representative of real-world scenarios.

D

The model lacks enough training data overall.

Understanding the Answer

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Answer

When a model keeps missing a particular class, it often means the loss function is not penalizing mistakes on that class enough, so the model learns to ignore it. In many training regimes, the cross‑entropy loss treats all classes equally, but if that class is rare or has noisy labels, the overall loss is dominated by the other, more frequent classes. As a result, the gradient signal for the minority class is weak, and the model never learns to distinguish it well. For example, if 90 % of the data are “dog” and only 10 % are “cat,” the loss will be driven mainly by dog errors, leaving cat predictions poorly calibrated. Thus, the most likely underlying cause is that the loss function does not properly weight or penalize misclassifications of that specific class.

Detailed Explanation

The loss function tells the model how bad a mistake is. Other options are incorrect because The idea that too many parameters cause the error is a common mistake; Thinking the data is the problem mixes data quality with the learning rule.

Key Concepts

Loss functions in classification
Classification evaluation metrics
Model training and generalization
Topic

Classification Summary

Difficulty

medium level question

Cognitive Level

understand

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