AI engineering glossary · Linear algebra
What is sparse vector?
Sparse vector: A vector in which most components are zero, stored compactly as index-value pairs. Bag-of-words and keyword-weight representations of text are sparse vectors, unlike the dense vectors produced by embedding models.
Sparse vector: an example
A 50,000-word vocabulary vector for a tweet with 12 distinct words has 12 non-zero entries and 49,988 zeros.
Related terms
More Linear algebra terms
- Spectral norm
- Spectral radius
- Spectral theorem
- Standard basis
- Subspace
- Symmetric matrix
- System of linear equations
- Tensor
Where you learn it
Sparse vector is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.