Evaluating your model

In this step, we try to measure the generalization error of our model on the unseen data. Since we only have the specific data without knowing any unseen data beforehand, we can randomly select a test set from the data and never use it in the training process so that it acts like valid unseen data. There are different ways you can to evaluate the performance of the selected model:

• Simple holdout method, which is dividing the data into training and testing sets
• Other complex methods, based on cross-validation and random subsampling

Our objective in this step is to compare the predictive performance for different models trained on the same data and choose the one with a better (smaller) testing error, which will give us a better generalization error over the unseen data. You can also be more certain about the generalization error by using a statistical method to test the significance of your results.