Training Data and Test Data

---

Training data and test data are two important concepts in machine learning. This chapter discusses them in detail.

Training Data

The observations in the training set form the experience that the algorithm uses to learn. In supervised learning problems, each observation consists of an observed output variable and one or more observed input variables.

Test Data

The test set is a set of observations used to evaluate the performance of the model using some performance metric. It is important that no observations from the training set are included in the test set. If the test set does contain examples from the training set, it will be difficult to assess whether the algorithm has learned to generalize from the training set or has simply memorized it.

A program that generalizes well will be able to effectively perform a task with new data. In contrast, a program that memorizes the training data by learning an overly complex model could predict the values of the response variable for the training set accurately, but will fail to predict the value of the response variable for new examples. Memorizing the training set is called over-fitting. A program that memorizes its observations may not perform its task well, as it could memorize relations and structures that are noise or coincidence. Balancing memorization and generalization, or over-fitting and under-fitting, is a problem common to many machine learning algorithms. Regularizationmay be applied to many models to reduce over-fitting.

In addition to the training and test data, a third set of observations, called a validation or hold-out set, is sometimes required. The validation set is used to tune variables called hyper parameters, which control how the model is learned. The program is still evaluated on the test set to provide an estimate of its performance in the real world; its performance on the validation set should not be used as an estimate of the model's real-world performance since the program has been tuned specifically to the validation data. It is common to partition a single set of supervised observations into training, validation, and test sets. There are no requirements for the sizes of the partitions, and they may vary according to the amount of data available. It is common to allocate 50 percent or more of the data to the training set, 25 percent to the test set, and the remainder to the validation set.

Some training sets may contain only a few hundred observations; others may include millions. Inexpensive storage, increased network connectivity, the ubiquity of sensor-packed smartphones, and shifting attitudes towards privacy have contributed to the contemporary state of big data, or training sets with millions or billions of examples.

However, machine learning algorithms also follow the maxim "garbage in, garbage out." A student who studies for a test by reading a large, confusing textbook that contains many errors will likely not score better than a student who reads a short but well-written textbook. Similarly, an algorithm trained on a large collection of noisy, irrelevant, or incorrectly labeled data will not perform better than an algorithm trained on a smaller set of data that is more representative of problems in the real world.

Many supervised training sets are prepared manually, or by semi-automated processes. Creating a large collection of supervised data can be costly in some domains. Fortunately, several datasets are bundled with scikit-learn, allowing developers to focus on experimenting with models instead.

During development, and particularly when training data is scarce, a practice called cross-validation can be used to train and validate an algorithm on the same data. In cross-validation, the training data is partitioned. The algorithm is trained using all but one of the partitions, and tested on the remaining partition. The partitions are then rotated several times so that the algorithm is trained and evaluated on all of the data.

Consider for example that the original dataset is partitioned into five subsets of equal size, labeled A through E. Initially, the model is trained on partitions B through E, and tested on partition A. In the next iteration, the model is trained on partitions A, C, D, and E, and tested on partition B. The partitions are rotated until models have been trained and tested on all of the partitions. Cross-validation provides a more accurate estimate of the model's performance than testing a single partition of the data.

Performance Measures − Bias and Variance

Many metrics can be used to measure whether or not a program is learning to perform its task more effectively. For supervised learning problems, many performance metrics measure the number of prediction errors.

There are two fundamental causes of prediction error for a model -bias and variance. Assume that you have many training sets that are all unique, but equally representative of the population. A model with a high bias will produce similar errors for an input regardless of the training set it was trained with; the model biases its own assumptions about the real relationship over the relationship demonstrated in the training data. A model with high variance, conversely, will produce different errors for an input depending on the training set that it was trained with. A model with high bias is inflexible, but a model with high variance may be so flexible that it models the noise in the training set. That is, a model with high variance over-fits the training data, while a model with high bias under-fits the training data.

Ideally, a model will have both low bias and variance, but efforts to decrease one will frequently increase the other. This is known as the bias-variance trade-off. We may have to consider the bias-variance tradeoffs of several models introduced in this tutorial. Unsupervised learning problems do not have an error signal to measure; instead, performance metrics for unsupervised learning problems measure some attributes of the structure discovered in the data. Most performance measures can only be worked out for a specific type of task.

Machine learning systems should be evaluated using performance measures that represent the costs of making errors in the real world. While this looks trivial, the following example illustrates the use of a performance measure that is right for the task in general but not for its specific application.

Accuracy, Precision and Recall

Consider a classification task in which a machine learning system observes tumors and has to predict whether these tumors are benign or malignant. Accuracy, or the fraction of instances that were classified correctly, is an obvious measure of the program's performance. While accuracy does measure the program's performance, it does not make distinction between malignant tumors that were classified as being benign, and benign tumors that were classified as being malignant. In some applications, the costs incurred on all types of errors may be the same. In this problem, however, failing to identify malignant tumors is a more serious error than classifying benign tumors as being malignant by mistake.

We can measure each of the possible prediction outcomes to create different snapshots of the classifier's performance. When the system correctly classifies a tumor as being malignant, the prediction is called a true positive. When the system incorrectly classifies a benign tumor as being malignant, the prediction is a false positive. Similarly, a false negative is an incorrect prediction that the tumor is benign, and a true negative is a correct prediction that a tumor is benign. These four outcomes can be used to calculate several common measures of classification performance, like accuracy, precision, recall and so on.

Accuracy is calculated with the following formula −

ACC = (TP + TN)/(TP + TN + FP + FN)

Where, TP is the number of true positives

TN is the number of true negatives

FP is the number of false positives

FN is the number of false negatives.

Precision is the fraction of the tumors that were predicted to be malignant that are actually malignant. Precision is calculated with the following formula −

PREC = TP/(TP + FP)

Recall is the fraction of malignant tumors that the system identified. Recall is calculated with the following formula −

R = TP/(TP + FN)

In this example, precision measures the fraction of tumors that were predicted to be malignant that are actually malignant. Recall measures the fraction of truly malignant tumors that were detected. The precision and recall measures could reveal that a classifier with impressive accuracy actually fails to detect most of the malignant tumors. If most tumors are benign, even a classifier that never predicts malignancy could have high accuracy. A different classifier with lower accuracy and higher recall might be better suited to the task, since it will detect more of the malignant tumors. Many other performance measures for classification can also be used.