How do you know if your model is going to work? Part 4: Cross-validation techniques

Concluding our guest post series!

Authors: John Mount (more articles) and Nina Zumel (more articles).

In this article we conclude our four part series on basic model testing.

When fitting and selecting models in a data science project, how do you know that your final model is good? And how sure are you that it’s better than the models that you rejected? In this concluding Part 4 of our four part mini-series “How do you know if your model is going to work?” we demonstrate cross-validation techniques.

Previously we worked on:

• Part 1: The problem
• Part 2: In-training set measures
• Part 3: Out of sample procedures

Cross-validation techniques

Cross validation techniques attempt to improve statistical efficiency by repeatedly splitting data into train and test and re-performing model fit and model evaluation.

For example: the variation called k-fold cross-validation splits the original data into k roughly equal sized sets. To score each set we build a model on all data not in the set and then apply the model to our set. This means we build k different models (none which is our final model, which is traditionally trained on all of the data).

Notional 3-fold cross validation (solid arrows are model construction/training, dashed arrows are model evaluation).

This is statistically efficient as each model is trained on a 1-1/k fraction of the data, so for k=20 we are using 95% of the data for training.

Another variation called “leave one out” (which is essentially Jackknife resampling) is very statistically efficient as each datum is scored on a unique model built using all other data. Though this is very computationally inefficient as you construct a very large number of models (except in special cases such as the PRESS statistic for linear regression).

Statisticians tend to prefer cross-validation techniques to test/train split as cross-validation techniques are more statistically efficient and can give sampling distribution style distributional estimates (instead of mere point estimates). However, remember cross validation techniques are measuring facts about the fitting procedure and not about the actual model in hand (so they are answering a different question than test/train split).

There is some attraction to actually scoring the model you are going to turn in (as is done with in-sample methods, and test/train split, but not with cross-validation). The way to remember this is: bosses are essentially frequentist (they want to know their team and procedure tends to produce good models) and employees are essentially Bayesian (they want to know the actual model they are turning in is likely good; see here for how it the nature of the question you are trying to answer controls if you are in a Bayesian or Frequentist situation).

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