Bias, Variance, and the Trade-off Between Them

61 min
Block 9 — Generalization
Objective
state and prove the decomposition of expected squared error into squared bias, variance and irreducible noise; define each term without ambiguity and measure all three by simulation rather than assert them; recognize the diagnostic signature of excess bias and that of excess variance; know which lever acts on which component and by how much, with measured numbers for regularization, for bagging, for boosting and for training-set size; understand why the identity is exact under squared loss and only approximate — or sign-ambiguous — under 0-1 loss; and know the boundary the overparameterized regime imposes on the framework.
Estimated duration
75 minutes
Prerequisites
chapters 026 (train/validation/test split), 030 (error, loss and metric) and 031 (overfitting and underfitting)
Associated quizzes
032.1-quiz-the-decomposition.md to 032.8-quiz-double-descent.md

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This lesson is part of the “Generalization, Overfitting and Underfitting” module

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