Case Study

Diagnosing the Effects of Regularization on a Dev Set Error

Case context: A machine learning engineer notices that their neural network has a high variance error. To resolve this, they decide to add regularization, choosing between L2 regularization, L1 regularization, or dropout.

Question: Describe the impact this decision will have on both the variance and the bias of the neural network model.

Sample answer: Introducing regularization (L2 regularization, L1 regularization, or dropout) will successfully reduce the model's variance. However, the engineer must expect that this change will also increase the model's bias.

Key points:

  • Adding regularization reduces variance.
  • Adding regularization increases bias.
  • The methods of regularization mentioned are L2 regularization, L1 regularization, and dropout.

Rubric: The student must identify that adding regularization (L2, L1, or dropout) reduces variance and increases bias.

0

1

Updated 2026-05-26

Contributors are:

Who are from:

Tags

Data Science

D2L

Dive into Deep Learning @ D2L

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Supervised Learning

Machine Learning Strategy