"machine learning models" entries

Get notified when our free report “Evaluating Machine Learning Models: A beginner’s guide to key concepts and pitfalls” is available for download. Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of “Evaluating Machine Learning Models,” by Alice Zheng.

Alice Zheng will be part of the Data Science Summit and Dato Conference in July — a non-profit event jointly organized by Intel, Comcast, Pandora, Dato, Cloudera, and O’Reilly Media — in San Francisco. Visit the conference website for more information on the program. Use the discount code OREILLY20 and get 20% off either one or both days of the conference.

This report on evaluating machine learning models arose out of a sense of need. The content was first published as a series of six technical posts on the Dato Machine Learning Blog. I was the editor of the blog, and I needed something to publish for the next day. Dato builds machine learning tools that help users build intelligent data products. In our conversations with the community, we sometimes ran into a confusion in terminology. For example, people would ask for cross validation as a feature, when what they really meant was hyperparameter tuning, a feature we already had. So, I thought, “Aha! I’ll just quickly explain what these concepts mean and point folks to the relevant sections in the user guide.”

I sat down to write a blog post to explain cross validation, hold-out data sets, and hyperparameter tuning. After the first two paragraphs, however, I realized that it would take a lot more than a single blog post. The three terms sit at different depths in the concept hierarchy of machine learning model evaluation. Cross validation and hold-out validation are ways of chopping up a data set in order to measure the model’s performance on “unseen” data. Hyperparameter tuning, on the other hand, is a more “meta” process of model selection. But why does the model need “unseen” data, and what’s meta about hyperparameters? In order to explain all of that, I needed to start from the basics. First, I needed to explain the high-level concepts and how they fit together. Only then could I dive into each one in detail. Read more…