Learning Data Mining with Python - Second Edition

Testing the algorithm

When we evaluated the affinity analysis algorithm of the earlier section, our aim was to explore the current dataset. With this classification, our problem is different. We want to build a model that will allow us to classify previously unseen samples by comparing them to what we know about the problem.

For this reason, we split our machine-learning workflow into two stages: training and testing. In training, we take a portion of the dataset and create our model. In testing, we apply that model and evaluate how effectively it worked on the dataset. As our goal is to create a model that can classify previously unseen samples, we cannot use our testing data for training the model. If we do, we run the risk of overfitting ...