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Detecting Model Overfitting

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Your question is Detecting Model Overfitting. Take a moment with it on the right.

Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).

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Problem

Scenario

You trained a model that looks strong on the data it saw during development, but the team is worried it may not generalize well to new data. You need to explain how you would tell whether the model is overfitting.

Question

How would you determine whether a model is overfitting?

What to Look For

  • Gap between training and validation or test performance
  • Cross-validation performance materially below training performance
  • Validation loss worsening while training loss keeps improving
  • Large gains in complexity with little or no holdout improvement