Hands-On Machine Learning with C++

Understanding the bias and variance characteristics

The bias and variance characteristics are used to predict model behavior. They are universal keywords. Before we go any further and describe what they mean, we should consider validation. Validation is a technique that's used to test model performance. It estimates how well the model makes predictions on new data. New data is data that we did not use for the training process. To perform validation, we usually divide our initial dataset in two or three parts. One part should contain most of the data and will be used for training, while other ones will be used to validate and test the model. Usually, validation is performed for iterative algorithms after one training cycle (often called an ...