huber

Huber is a surname of German origin that is found in German-speaking countries and in communities around the world. As a surname, it appears across fields such as science, engineering, the arts, and public life, reflecting its widespread adoption in areas with German linguistic or cultural influence. The name is also encountered in geographic and institutional names in regions with historical ties to German-speaking populations.

In statistics and machine learning, the Huber loss (or Huber function) is a robust loss function named after Peter J. Huber, who introduced ideas on robust estimation in the 1960s. The Huber loss behaves like the squared error for small residuals and transitions to a linear penalty for large residuals, making it less sensitive to outliers than purely quadratic losses. This blend of L2 and L1 characteristics helps stabilize parameter estimates in regression and is widely used in optimization, robust statistics, and computer vision. The loss is typically defined with a threshold parameter delta that governs the switch between the quadratic and linear regimes, and various variants or smoothing approaches have been developed for different applications.

Beyond a surname and a statistical concept, Huber may appear in place names, family histories, and brand or organization names in communities with German heritage. The term is therefore used in multiple, related contexts but remains most prominent in the fields of genealogy and robust statistics.