Test-Driven Machine Learning

TDD applied to machine learning

At this point, you maybe wondering how TDD will be used in machine learning, and whether we use it on regression or classification problems. In every machine learning algorithm there exists a way to quantify the quality of what you're doing. In the linear regression it's your adjusted R2 value; in classification problems it's an ROC curve (and the area beneath it) or a confusion matrix, and more. All of these are testable quantities. Of course, none of these quantities have a built-in way of saying that the algorithm is good enough.

We can get around this by starting our work on every problem by first building up a completely naïve and ignorant algorithm. The scores that we get for this will basically represent a ...