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by thanatropism 3494 days ago
No it isn't.

Differentiability is important if you want to have an closed-form formula and derive it in front of undergraduates.

1 comments

This is the difference between practice and theory. In theory differential objectives don't matter, in practice for medium to large datasets they make machine learning a lot faster. Speed is critical, as you need to be able to iterate quickly. The solution most commonly used on Kaggle is to transform the target feature and then minimize mean squared error, but there is some systematic uncertainty introduced by this.