AI engineering glossary · ML fundamentals
What is random seed?
Random seed (also called Random state): A starting number given to a random number generator so that random steps, such as shuffling or weight initialisation, produce the same sequence each time. Fixing it makes experiments repeatable, and varying it shows how sensitive results are to chance.
Random seed: an example
Setting random_state = 42 when splitting data gives the same train and test rows on every run.
Related terms
More ML fundamentals terms
- Regression
- Regularisation
- Representation learning
- Reproducibility
- Selection bias
- Self-supervised learning
- Semi-supervised learning
- Shortcut learning
Where you learn it
Random seed is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.