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Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning

You're reading from   Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning Perform data mining and machine learning efficiently using Python and Spark

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781787280748
Length 420 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Frank Kane Frank Kane
Author Profile Icon Frank Kane
Frank Kane
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Started FREE CHAPTER 2. Statistics and Probability Refresher, and Python Practice 3. Matplotlib and Advanced Probability Concepts 4. Predictive Models 5. Machine Learning with Python 6. Recommender Systems 7. More Data Mining and Machine Learning Techniques 8. Dealing with Real-World Data 9. Apache Spark - Machine Learning on Big Data 10. Testing and Experimental Design

Bias/variance trade-off

One of the basic challenges that we face when dealing with real-world data is overfitting versus underfitting your regressions to that data, or your models, or your predictions. When we talk about underfitting and overfitting, we can often talk about that in the context of bias and variance, and the bias-variance trade-off. So, let's talk about what that means.

So conceptually, bias and variance are pretty simple. Bias is just how far off you are from the correct values, that is, how good are your predictions overall in predicting the right overall value. If you take the mean of all your predictions, are they more or less on the right spot? Or are your errors all consistently skewed in one direction or another? If so, then your predictions are biased in a certain direction.

Variance is just a measure of how spread out, how scattered your predictions...

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