Short Definition
A vector is an ordered list of numbers that can represent a point, direction, feature set, or embedding.
Intuition
Vectors give models a numerical way to place objects in a space and compare them.
Technical Definition
A vector is an element of a vector space, often represented in ML as a one-dimensional array of numeric components.
Example
A document embedding is a vector whose coordinates encode learned semantic features.
Common Misunderstandings
Vector dimensions are not always directly interpretable.
Vectors only become meaningful through the space and metric used with them.