Overfitting

As we have seen in our fish recognition task, we have tried to enhance our model's performance by increasing the model complexity and perfectly classifying every single instance of the training samples. As we will see later, such models do not work over unseen data (such as the data that we will use for testing the performance of our model). Having trained models that work perfectly over the training samples but fail to perform well over the testing samples is called overfitting.

If you sift through the latter part of the chapter, we build a learning system with an objective to use the training samples as a knowledge base for our model in order to learn from it and generalize over the unseen data. Performance error of the trained model is of no interest to us over the training data; rather, we are interested in the performance (generalization) error of the trained model over the testing samples that haven't been involved in the training phase.