identifying

Definition

Pinpointing which thing something is, or what is responsible for an observed effect — the framing of both recognition tasks and diagnostic analyses. Watch for a false friend: in causal inference, "identification" is a technical question about whether a quantity of interest is uniquely determined by the observable distribution at all, regardless of how much data you collect. That sense has nothing to do with recognition.

Explainers using this term

• Convexity and Optimization — Why Deep Learning Works Even Though It Isn't ConvexIdentifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization