# Understand Cosine Similarity Softmax: A Beginner Guide – Machine Learning Tutorial

By | September 28, 2020

Cosine Similarity Softmax is an improvement of traditional softmax function. In this tutorial, we will intorduce it for machine learning beginners.

## Softmax function

Softmax function is widely used in text classification. As to text classification problem, softmax function can be difined as:

where K is the number of classification.

From the the equation of softmax function: P(y = i|X), we can find:

The value of P is determined by the dot product of vector wi and X.

## Cosine Similarity Softmax

Suppose the lenght of W and X is 1, b = 0

Y = W•X

=||w||*||X||*cosθ

=cosθ

cosine similarity softmax can be:

if we only suppose b=  0, we also can define P(y=i|X),

where cosθi = wi•X/||wi||*||X||

However, cosθ∈[-1,1], in order to improve the performance of cosine similarity softmax, we can update it to:

S is a hyper parameter, you can set the value by your own situation.

S can be 2, 4, 6 or 32, 64