An Overview of Cross-Validation Techniques in Machine Learning

Zunaira Kannwal
4 min readJun 26, 2024

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Cross-validation, a crucial technique in machine learning, is involved in assessing the performance and generalizability of models. It offers a robust way to estimate the model’s accuracy on unseen data by partitioning the data into subsets, training the typical on some subsets, and validating it on the lasting subsets. This article will delve into the various cross-validation techniques and their applications, highlighting the important role of cross-validation in assessing model performance.

Why Cross-Validation?

In machine learning, evaluating a model solely on exercise data is not sufficient because it can lead to overfitting, where the model performs well on the training data but poorly on new, hidden data. Cross-validation addresses this by providing a more correct measure of a model’s presentation.

Common Cross-Validation Techniques

  1. Holdout Method
  2. K-Fold Cross-Validation
  3. Stratified K-Fold Cross-Validation
  4. Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV)
  5. Leave-P-Out Cross-Validation
  6. Time Series Cross-Validation
  7. Holdout Method

The holdout method is the simplest form of cross-validation. The dataset is arbitrarily divided into two subsets: a training set and a test set. The model is trained on the exercise set and evaluated on the test set. This method is upfront but can be less reliable, especially with small datasets, as the results can vary meaningfully depending on how the data is split.

2. K-Fold Cross-Validation

K-Fold cross-validation is a more dependable method than the holdout method. The dataset is divided into K equally sized folds. The model is trained K times, using K-1 folds for working out and the remaining fold for validation. The process is repeated K times, with each folding used precisely once for validation. The final performance metric is the ordinary of the K runs. This method reduces the variance of the performance approximation and is widely used.

3. Stratified K-Fold Cross-Validation

Stratified K-Fold cross-validation is a variant of K-Fold cross-validation that confirms each fold has approximately the same distribution of class labels as the entire dataset. This is mostly important for imbalanced datasets, where some classes are understated. Stratified K-Fold ensures that each fold is representative of the overall class distribution, provided that more reliable performance estimates.

4. Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV)

In LOOCV, each instance in the dataset is used once as a justification set, while the remaining instances form the training set. This process is frequent for each instance. LOOCV is computationally intensive, specially for large datasets, but it provides an unbiased estimation of the model’s performance.

5. Leave-P-Out Cross-Validation

Leave-P-Out cross-validation is a simplification of LOOCV where P instances are left out for validation, and the remaining instances are used for training. This procedure is repeated for all possible combinations of P instances. While this method is supposedly appealing,

6. Time Series Cross-Validation

For time series data, standard cross-validation methods are not appropriate because they do not respect the temporal ordering of the data. Time series cross-validation, which includes creating training and validation sets that preserve the order of the data, is crucial. One common method is the rolling-origin cross-validation, where the model is trained on a rising window of past observations and validated on a fixed window of future explanations. This method is essential as it mimics real-world situations where models are used to make predictions on future data.

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