What is Bias-variance trade-off

Bias-variance trade-off is a central problem in supervised learning. Ideally, one wants to choose a model that both accurately captures the regularities in its training data, but also generalizes well to unseen data. In statistics and machine learning bias-variance trade-off is the problem of simultaneously minimizing two sources of error that prevent supervised learning algorithms from generalizing beyond their training set:
(1) The bias is an error from erroneous assumptions in the learning algorithm. High bias can cause an algorithm to miss the relevant relations between features and target outputs (underfitting). (2) The variance is an error from sensitivity to small fluctuations in the training set. High variance can cause overfitting: modeling the random noise in the training data, rather than the intended outputs.
The bias–variance decomposition is a way of analyzing a learning algorithm’s expected generalization error with respect to a particular problem as a sum of three terms, the bias, variance, and a quantity called the irreducible error, resulting from noise in the problem itself.

This tradeoff applies to all forms of supervised learning: classification, regression (function fitting), and structured output learning. It has also been invoked to explain the effectiveness of heuristics in human learning.

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