target
A target is a goal you aim for, a person or thing you focus on, or an object of criticism or praise. People set targets at work, on a shooting range, or in marketing campaigns.
What a model may hear
- build target software compilation and build systems
- treat the word as a named output, dependency, or rule to execute, such as in Make, Bazel, or CMake
- target variable machine learning and statistics
- identify the output column or label being predicted in a dataset or model training pipeline
- target element or node web development and DOM manipulation
- select the specific HTML element that triggered an event or that an action applies to
- target network reinforcement learning
- refer to a separate, slowly-updated copy of a neural network used to stabilize training
Where people and models part ways
“Hit the target”
Meant: achieve the goal or score points
May be taken as: trigger build execution, deploy code, or flag an action as completed in a CI/CD system
Say instead: “Achieve the goal or reach the objective”
“Change the target”
Meant: switch focus to a different goal or audience
May be taken as: alter the build rule, switch the prediction label, or retarget a DOM element causing errors
Say instead: “Switch to a different goal or focus on a different audience”
“The target is wrong”
Meant: the goal or objective is misguided
May be taken as: flag a data label as incorrect or corrupt, triggering retraining or data cleaning pipelines
Say instead: “The goal or objective is wrong”
Tips
- Say 'goal' or 'objective' when you mean an aim to achieve, not a system output
- Specify 'build target' or 'prediction target' when you do mean the technical sense
- Avoid 'target' as a verb with models; say 'select,' 'focus on,' or 'aim for' instead
- In machine learning contexts, say 'label' or 'ground truth' instead of 'target' if you mean the human-assigned answer
Often confused with
- goal
- purely human aim, no technical system output
- label
- explicitly the assigned answer in machine learning, not the general aim
- objective
- optimization direction, often a function to minimize or maximize
- aim
- intention without system execution connotations
- destination
- physical or endpoint location, not a rule or variable