What is Regularization?

Regularization in the field of machine learning is a process of introducing additional information in order to solve an ill-posed problem or to prevent overfitting. A theoretical justification for regularization is that it attempts to impose Occam’s razor on the solution, as depicted in the figure. From a Bayesian point of view, many regularization techniques correspond to imposing certain prior distributions on model parameters. Regularization can be used to learn simpler models, induce models to be sparse, introduce group structure into the learning problem, and more. The same idea arose in many fields of science. For example, the least-squares method can be viewed as a very simple form of regularization.

Was the above useful? Please share with others on social media.

If you want to look for more information, check some free online courses available at   coursera.orgedx.org or udemy.com.

Recommended reading list:

 

Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python

Data science libraries, frameworks, modules, and toolkits are great for doing data science, but they’re also a good way to dive into the discipline without actually understanding data science. In this book, you’ll learn how many of the most fundamental data science tools and algorithms work by implementing them from scratch.

If you have an aptitude for mathematics and some programming skills, author Joel Grus will help you get comfortable with the math and statistics at the core of data science, and with hacking skills you need to get started as a data scientist. Today’s messy glut of data holds answers to questions no one’s even thought to ask. This book provides you with the know-how to dig those answers out.

Get a crash course in Python
Learn the basics of linear algebra, statistics, and probability—and understand how and when they're used in data science
Collect, explore, clean, munge, and manipulate data
Dive into the fundamentals of machine learning
Implement models such as k-nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, linear and logistic regression, decision trees, neural networks, and clustering
Explore recommender systems, natural language processing, network analysis, MapReduce, and databases