"Shotgun" just means "with restarts" (right?) but what do you mean by "ballistic"? "With momentum" maybe? I can't see that term used anywhere in the literature.
Sorry - how does what differ from a "learning rate"? Learning rate as used in what connection? As far as I can see there is no connection between what I've described and anything I will call a learning rate in any of the other methods, so you'll have to be more explicit.
Ah, I meant your notion of velocity/ballistic. I'm thinking of the learning rate parameter you might use to control how quickly a gradient descent algorithm converges for some machine learning algorithm.
