Hands-On Machine Learning for Cybersecurity

Overfitting

The production of an analysis that corresponds too closely or exactly to a particular set of data, and may therefore fail to fit additional data or predict future observations reliably.

- Oxford Dictionary

Overfitting is the phenomenon in which the system is too fitted to the training data. The system produces a negative bias when treated with new data. In other words, the models perform badly. Often this is because we feed only labelled data to our model. Hence we need both labelled and unlabelled data to train a machine learning system.

The following graph shows that to prevent any model errors we need to select data in the optimal order: