Concept

Training Error and Test Error

Typically, when training a machine learning model, we have access to a training set; we can compute some error measure on the training set, called the training error; and we reduce this training error.

What separates machine learning from optimization is that we want the generalization error, also called the test error, to be low as well. The test error is defined as the expected value of the error on a new input. Here the expectation is taken across different possible inputs, drawn from the distribution of inputs we expect the system to encounter in practice.

We typically estimate the test error of a machine learning model by measuring its performance on a test set of examples that were collected separately from the training set.

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Updated 2026-05-03

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Data Science

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