What is regularization?

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Regularization is a semi-automated method to manage overfitting. The core idea is to avoid overfitting by penalizing model complexity.

Regularization improves a model performance by decreasing variance at the cost of increasing a bit of bias but to a lesser extent.

General shape

The general shape of a regularized loss function $\l_\text{reg}$ is the following:

$\l_\text{reg}(\sets, \vw) = \l(\sets, \vw) + \lambda\mathcal{R}(\vw)$

Where $\sets$ is the dataset on which we compute the loss and $\vw$ is the vector of parameters for our model.

The hyper-parameter

The hyper-parameter $\lambda$ allows us to control the importance of the regularization. When $\lambda = 0$ the regularizer is canceled and we get the unregularized solution. When $\lambda \to \infty$ , we get an intercept-only model.

TODO graph the curve as lambda variates.

A word of caution

It is important to normalize the features before using regularization. Failure to do so will yield incoherent regularization behavior.

Common regularizers

The L2 norm

$\mathcal{R}_2(\vw) = \normtwo{\vw}$

An ordinary least squares regression with $L_2$ regularization is named a ridge regression.

The L1 norm

$\mathcal{R}_1(\vw) = \normone{\vw}$

An ordinary least squares regression with $L_1$ regularization is named a lasso regression.