AI engineering glossary · ML fundamentals

What is generalisation gap?

Generalisation gap: The difference between a model's performance on data it trained on and on unseen data. A large gap signals memorisation of the training set. Tracking it is a quick way to spot trouble and decide whether more data, simpler models or regularisation would help.

Level: intermediateTopic: ML fundamentals

Generalisation gap: an example

Accuracy of 99% on training data but 82% on validation data shows a gap of 17 percentage points.

Related terms

More ML fundamentals terms

Where you learn it

Generalisation gap is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.

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