Model Regularization
The goal of regularization is to avoid overfitting by penalizing more complex models. Regularization significantly reduces the variance of the model without a substantial increase in its bias. In general, to penalized more complex models, additional penalty term(s) is added to the cost function (Cost function + 位 * R, where R is coefficients or the weights and 位 is a tuning parameter). The tuning parameter controls the impact on the bias and variance and lets the researcher adjust the impact of coefficient (in machine learning) or weight matrices of the nodes (in deep learning) to overcome the overfitting problem. As the value of 位 increases, it reduced the value of coefficients and thus reducing the variance (hence avoid overfitting). Although, after certain value, the increase in 位 may lead to increase in bias in the model (hence result in underfitting). Two of the most common regularization methods are (1) Lasso regression (also known as L1 penalty), which penalize the absolute value of the coefficients/weights; and (2) Ridge regression (also known as L2 penalty), which penalize the squared value of the coefficients/weights. L2 regularization forces the weights to decay toward zero (but not exactly zero), while the weights in L1 regularization may be reduced to zero.
Another regularization techniques that can only be applied to neural networks is a drop-out. Drop-out regularization works by randomly selecting some nodes and remove them along with all of their incoming and outgoing connections at every iteration. This approach is similar to the idea of ensemble technique in machine learning and works very well when dealing with a large neural networks structure. The other techniques that help to avoid overfitting in the context of neural networks are data augmentation and early stopping. The former approach is more common in image processing where the data scientist try to increase the size of training data by adding some noise to the data(here image), such as rotating the image, flipping, scaling, shifting, blurring, etc.
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