training set

In machine learning, the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data[1] is a common task. Such algorithms work by making data-driven predictions or decisions,[2]:2 through building a mathematical model from input data.

The data used to build the final model usually comes from multiple datasets. In particular, three data sets are commonly used in different stages of the creation of the model.

The model is initially fit on a training dataset,[3] that is a set of examples used to fit the parameters (e.g. weights of connections between neurons in artificial neural networks) of the model.[4] The model (e.g. a neural net or a naive Bayes classifier) is trained on the training dataset using a supervised learning method (e.g. gradient descent or stochastic gradient descent). In practice, the training dataset often consist of pairs of an input vector and the corresponding answer vector or scalar, which is commonly denoted as the target. The current model is run with the training dataset and produces a result, which is then compared with the target, for each input vector in the training dataset. Based on the result of the comparison and the specific learning algorithm being used, the parameters of the model are adjusted. The model fitting can include both variable selection and parameter estimation.

Successively, the fitted model is used to predict the responses for the observations in a second dataset called the validation dataset.[3] The validation dataset provides an unbiased evaluation of a model fit on the training dataset while tuning the model's hyperparameters [5] (e.g. the number of hidden units in a neural network[4]). Validation datasets can be used for regularization by early stopping: stop training when the error on the validation dataset increases, as this is a sign of overfitting to the training dataset.[6] This simple procedure is complicated in practice by the fact that the validation dataset's error may fluctuate during training, producing multiple local minima. This complication has led to the creation of many ad-hoc rules for deciding when overfitting has truly begun.[6]

Finally, the test dataset is a dataset used to provide an unbiased evaluation of a final model fit on the training dataset.[5]

Confusingly the terms test dataset and validation dataset are sometimes used with swapped meaning. As a result it has become commonplace to refer to the set used in iterative training as the test/validation set and the set that is used for hyperparameter tuning as the holdout set.