AI engineering glossary · ML fundamentals
What is ablation study?
Ablation study: An experiment that removes or disables one component of a system at a time, such as a feature or a module, to measure how much each contributes to performance. It shows what really matters and what is unnecessary.
Ablation study: an example
Dropping the 'location' feature lowers accuracy from 86% to 79%, showing it is important; dropping 'day of week' changes nothing.
Related terms
More ML fundamentals terms
- Active learning
- Akaike information criterion
- Annotation
- Baseline model
- Bayesian information criterion
- Bias error
- Bias-variance tradeoff
- Classification
Where you learn it
Ablation study is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.