In the spirit of my last post, I want to continue talking about some common mistakes I see among machine learning practitioners. Last time, we saw how covariate shift can be accidentally introduced by (seemingly harmlessly) applying a fit_transform to your test data. This time, I want to cover an equally egregious practice: data dredging.

## What’s data dredging?

Also commonly called “p-hacking,” data dredging is essentially the practice of allowing your test or validation set to inform decisions around your model-building or hyper-parameter tuning. In a practical sense, it’s when you repeatedly expose your holdout set to your model while continuing to make adjustments.

## When does it typically occur?

Most of the time I see data dredging, it’s in the context of evaluating a grid search. Here’s a quick problem setup:

At this point, we’ve fit a valid model, and we want to know how it performs. So what do most people do? They score the model against their holdout set:

But this is a dangerous practice!!! By introducing your holdout set too early, your design decisions may reflect what you’ve learned about the model’s performance. Maybe you re-fit, trying more estimators or a steeper learning rate. In both cases, you only did so because your model didn’t perform well enough against the holdout set, and what ends up happening is that you begin to slowly tailor the model until it scores well-enough against your test set.

In a sense, you end up inadvertently fitting your test set. Any model-tuning action you take as a result of scoring against your holdout set is data dredging.

## “But I’m not fitting my test set. How is this bad?”

You don’t have to fit your test set directly in order to leak information to your models. There is an inherit bias that the analyst/scientist/engineer imparts on his/her models, and by making repeated decisions based on hold-out performance, you inflate the personal bias you impose.

You might end up acheiving outstanding performance on your test set, but your model will likely not generalize well to the new data it sees once you deploy it.

## Why does this happen?

I have several hypotheses for why I see this practice so much:

#### 1. Academic settings don’t emphasize the model lifecycle

In most academic settings, machine learning problems begin and end with achieving the best model possible on the provided test set. Naturally, if you’re already provided said holdout set, you’re more tempted to p-hack, and budding data scientists don’t learn to consider that the model will have to make decisions on future data that does not have corresponding labels.

#### 2. People misunderstand the purpose of cross-validation

For such a well-documented concept, few things in ML share the level of misunderstanding that CV suffers. Lots of folks use it interchangeably with train/test splits, and yet others seem to assume that if a model is fit with cross-validation, it’s impervious to the perils of overfitting.

Neither is true, and as a result, CV isn’t used to its full potential.

## How can we avoid it?

Avoiding data dredging is more simple that you might think. The answer, as with most things in machine learning, is cross validation! We can approach this several ways.

### Benchmark a model with cross_val_score

You typically don’t go straight into a grid search. First, you try several models. Scikit allows us to fit a model in the context of cross validation and examine the fold scores. This is useful for determining whether a model will perform in the ballpark of business requirements before a lengthy tuning process:

If your model needs to perform at, say, an MSE of <= 15 (for the arbitrary sake of argument), you might feel confident that you could tune a model that will perform to standards. However, if you need to achieve, say, <= 5, you may need to select a different model family or tune your hyper parameters significantly.

If you’ve already fit your search, it’s even easier. Scikit allows us to extract the cross validation scores from a grid search without us having to touch the test set:

This gives us a pandas frame from which we ascertain the CV scores for each fold, the parameters that contribute to the highest scores, and other valuable information:

split0_test_score split1_test_score split2_test_score params
14 -9.779118 -36.088421 -11.244133 {‘learning_rate’: 0.01, ‘max_depth’: 7, ‘min_s…
2 -13.972549 -38.821430 -15.160443 {‘learning_rate’: 0.009052631578947368, ‘max_d…
13 -14.944225 -39.504609 -15.895012 {‘learning_rate’: 0.0062105263157894745, ‘max_…

## Closing thoughts

You need to be careful about introducing your test set to the mix of things. The test set is generally intended to aid in model selection, and should be introduced as a selection technique after competing models have been tuned.

Rather that using your test set to gauge generalizability, use cross-validation to make informed decisions about how to further tune a model’s parameters. The full code for this example is located in the code folder.