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Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning vocabulary · Evaluation and Metrics

Test set

Meaning in artificial intelligence & machine learning, with examples

nounCore term

In artificial intelligence & machine learning, test set means: A part of the data kept aside and used only at the end, to measure how well a finished model works on examples it has never seen.

In Turkish: test kümesi, test seti

How it is used

Kept separate from the training and validation sets. The golden rule is never to tune anything on the test set; otherwise the final score looks better than the real performance. Also called the held-out set or test split.

Example sentences

  1. We ran the model on the test set only once, after all tuning was finished.

  2. Some test set examples were also in the training data, so the score isn't reliable.

Common collocations

  • held-out test set
  • evaluate on the test set
  • test set accuracy
  • test split
  • validation setA part of the data kept out of training and used during development to compare models, tune settings and decide when to stop training.
  • training dataThe examples a model learns from during training. Their quality, size and variety largely decide how well the model works on new data.
  • data leakageA mistake in which information that won't be available at prediction time, such as test examples or future data, gets into training and makes results look better than they are.
  • accuracyThe share of a model's predictions that are correct, out of all its predictions. A model with 90% accuracy is right on nine of every ten examples.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Evaluation and Metrics

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