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Training, Validation, and Test Sets

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Absolutely! Understanding the roles of training, validation, and test sets is essential for building and evaluating machine learning models effectively.

📂 1. Training Set

  • Purpose: Used to teach the model.
  • Contains: Input data + correct output labels.
  • What happens: The model learns patterns and adjusts its parameters using this data.

🧪 2. Validation Set

  • Purpose: Used to tune hyperparameters and check the model’s performance during training.
  • Contains: Data the model hasn’t seen during training.
  • What happens: Helps detect overfitting or underfitting.
  • Example use: Choosing the number of layers in a neural network or deciding when to stop training (early stopping).

3. Test Set

  • Purpose: Used only at the very end to evaluate the final model’s performance.
  • Contains: Completely unseen data.
  • What happens: Measures how well the model generalizes to real-world data.

🎯 Summary Table:

Set Used For When Used
Training Learning patterns During training
Validation Model tuning & evaluation During training
Test Final performance check After training

Would you like a visual flowchart showing how these sets are used in the ML workflow?