Model Selection
Last edited: October 10, 2025Model selection:
- choose some parameters
- evaluate every model using a Model Evaluation method of some kind
- and in production…
- k-fold or LOOCV: retrain best model on all data
- Hold-out cross-validation: optionally retrain, if you have time
A special case of model selection is feature selection:
- choose a subset of the most relevant features to train on
- note that power set is \(2^{m}\) in size; so instead of doing this we train \(O\qty(n)\) by starting out with an empty set, and then adding features sequentially that would give us the best performance
overfitting
Last edited: October 10, 2025consider something like a polynomial interpolation:
Interpolating polynomial (or most ML models in general) are smooth, and so interpolating between points will result in “overshooting” regional points and “bouncing around”
…as a function of parameters
At a fixed dataset, just increasing the number of parameters will increase
SU-CS229 OCT062025
Last edited: October 10, 2025Key Sequence
Notation
New Concepts
Important Results / Claims
Questions
Interesting Factoids
Decisions.jl
Last edited: October 10, 2025A general formulation of decision networks; track:
- track how distributions affect each other (i.e. generalize your problem into a Bayes Net)
- apply transformation of the edges to your new problem type structure
- transform back into your new formulation’s solver
- solve
Limited Samples and Infinite Compute
Last edited: October 10, 2025One-Liner
“If you have infinite compute but limited samples, how do you pretrain?”
Novelty
- closed-form best approach which reduces loss given the current data budget
Notable Methods
Outline
- Takes 200 million tokens, 300 million parameters, from a corpus
- Measure validation loss
- Vary training recipes
regularized parameter scaling
Stick in some more weight decay: more parameters, more weight decay
| Model | WDK |
|---|---|
| 150M | 0.8 |
| 300M | 1.6 |
| 600M | 3.2 |
| 1.4B | 3.2 |
ensembling
Train a bunch of seperate models (i.e. with random shuffles?) and then parameter merge; different initialization, etc.
