Both L1 and L2 normalization are beneficial in various conditions.
Advantages of L2 over L1 norm
- Mathematical derivations of the L2 norm are easily computed. Therefore it is also easy to use gradient-based learning methods.
- L2 regularization optimizes the mean cost (whereas L1 reduces the median explanation) which is often used as a performance measurement. This is especially good if you know you don't have any outliers and you want to keep the overall error small.
- The solution is more likely to be unique. This ties in with the previous point: While the mean is a single value, the median might be located in an interval between two points and is therefore not unique.
- While L1 regularization can give you a sparse coefficient vector, the non-sparseness of L2 can improve your prediction performance (since you leverage more features instead of simply ignoring them).
- L2 is invariant under rotation. If you have a dataset consisting of points in a space and you apply a rotation, you still get the same results.
Advantages of L1 over L2 norm
- The L1 norm prefers sparse coefficient vectors. This means the L1 norm performs feature selection and you can delete all features where the coefficient is 0. A reduction of the dimensions is useful in almost all cases.
- The L1 norm optimizes the median. Therefore the L1 norm is not sensitive to outliers.
Hope this answer helps you!
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