traditional squared error
cross-entropy
《What is cross-entropy, and why use it?》
The cross-entropy measure has been used as an alternative to squared error. Cross-entropy can be used as an error measure when a network’s outputs can be thought of as representing independent hypotheses (e.g. each node stands for a different concept), and the node activations can be understood as representing the probability (or confidence) that each hypothesis might be true. In that case, the output vector represents a probability distribution, and our error measure - cross-entropy - indicates the distance between what the network believes this distribution should be, and what the teacher says it should be. There is a practical reason to use cross-entropy as well. It may be more useful in problems in which the targets are 0 and 1 (thought the outputs obviously may assume values in between.) Cross-entropy tends to allow errors to change weights even when nodes saturate (which means that their derivatives are asymptotically close to 0.)
Cross-entropy
Cross-entropy error function and logistic regression