Sure enough, the loss for the first classifier (.37) is less than the loss for the second classifier (1.17). Why does minimizing this negative log probability do what we want? A perfect classifier would assign probability 1 to the correct outcome (y=1 or y=0) and probability 0 to the incorrect outcome. That means the higherŷ (the closer it is to 1), the better the classifier; the lowerŷ is (the closer it is to 0), the worse the classifier. The negative log of this probability is a convenient loss metric since it goes from 0 (negative log of 1, no loss) to infinity (negative log of 0, infinite loss). This loss function also ensures that as the probability of the correct answer is maximized, the probability of the incorrect answer is minimized; since the two sum to one, any increase in the probability of the correct answer is coming at the expense of the incorrect answer. It's called the cross-entropy loss, because Eq. 5.10 is also the formula for the cross-entropy between the true probability distribution y and our estimated distributionŷ.