The hyperbolic tangent (tanh) is a traditional choice for the activation function of the neurons of an artificial neural network. Here, we go through a simple calculation that shows that this modeling choice is linked to Bayesian decision theory. Our brief, tutorial-like discussion is intended as a reference to an observation rarely mentioned in standard textbooks.
We are concerned with k-medoids clustering and propose aquadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) formulation of the problem of identifying k medoids among n data points without having to cluster the data. Given our QUBO formulation of this NP-hard problem, it should be possible to solve it on adiabatic quantum computers.