Learn Before
Concept icon
Concept

Choosing a Dev Set Large Enough to See Small Gains

Choose the development-set size according to the smallest performance gain that must influence model selection. For ordinary unweighted accuracy on 100 examples, each additional correct prediction changes measured accuracy by 1 percentage point, so the set cannot directly register a 0.1-percentage-point difference such as 88.0% versus 88.1%. Detecting smaller meaningful gains generally requires a larger development set, while further expansion is unnecessary once the set can reliably resolve the differences that matter.

0

1

Concept icon
Updated 2026-09-19

Contributors are:

Who are from:

Tags

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Supervised Learning

Dive into Deep Learning @ D2L

Data Science

Machine Learning Strategy

Machine Learning Yearning @ DeepLearning.AI