Define underfitting and overfitting

Data Science, AI and ML
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#1

Most statistics and ML projects need to fit a model on training data to be able to create predictions. There can be two problems while fitting a model- overfitting and underfitting.

  • Overfitting is when a model has random error/noise and not the expected relationship. If a model has a large number of parameters or is too complex, there can be overfitting. This leads to bad performance because minor changes to training data highly changes the model’s result.
  • Underfitting is when a model is not able to understand the trends in the data. This can happen if you try to fit a linear model to non-linear data. This also results in bad performance.