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No, I am talking about out of sample error and estimates thereof. It is "overfitting" to data, but it also has lower out of sample error than the case where you
by hodgehog11 11d ago
No, I am talking about out of sample error and estimates thereof. It is "overfitting" to data, but it also has lower out of sample error than the case where you do not "overfit".
This is why the notion of overfitting is not nearly as cut and dry as a basic ML course would have you believe. Just because you fit data exactly does not mean that your estimator has high error on out of sample data. A trivial counterexample is a spiking model that spikes to fit to the data but otherwise follows the correct trend outside of the dataset. The bias variance tradeoff gets thrown out at enormous scale and overfitting is not a meaningful concept. What matters is regularization and robustness, not how well you fit the data.
The reason why bias variance tradeoff and considerations of model size are a good approximation for smaller models is due to concentration of measure in the data which effectively kills any regularization in your modelling procedure. Once you enter settings where concentration of measure begins to bite in parameter space, everything changes. This isn't really that mysterious; any textbook on Gaussian processes (e.g. Rasmussen and Williams) will tell you this.
- jmalicki 11d agoNothing in your reply gets at the connection to out of sample data?
- hodgehog11 10d agoI don't understand what you mean. Test error is literally out of sample error. Marginal likelihood is designed to estimate out of sample error. The whole discussion is about out of sample; nothing has been about in-sample error. The in-sample error for my examples are all trivially zero, so only out of sample error is worth discussing.
- kcexn 8d agoHuh. This reminds me of the asymptotic equipartition theorem. Samples taken from higher and higher dimensional spaces will concentrate into a typical set. Does model performance also concentrate into a 'typical case' where things work pretty well and a non-typical case where it's completely unpredictable as the number of parameters increase?