Definition of "epoch" in English

noun

1. A particular period of history, or of a person's life, especially one considered noteworthy or remarkable.

2. A notable event which marks the beginning of such a period.

3. (chronology, astronomy, computing) A specific instant in time, chosen as the point of reference or zero value of a system that involves identifying instants of time.

   • UNIX epoch; J2000 epoch

4. (geology) A geochronologic unit of hundreds of thousands to millions of years; a subdivision of a period, and subdivided into ages (or sometimes subepochs).

5. (machine learning) One complete presentation of the training data set to an iterative machine learning algorithm.

   • The neural network was trained over 500 epochs.

verb

1. (sciences, transitive) To divide (data) into segments by time period.