overfitting

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a modelling failure in which a machine learning algorithm learns the training data too closely, capturing noise and random fluctuations as if they were genuine patterns; an overfit model performs very well on training data but fails to generalise to unseen data, exhibiting high variance; mitigated by regularisation techniques including L1 and L2 penalties, dropout, early stopping, data augmentation, and cross-validation to detect the point of diminishing returns on training