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Data Science - Interview Questions
How do you evaluate a machine learning model?
Evaluating a machine learning model is an important step in the development process to assess its performance and determine its suitability for the task at hand. There are several metrics that can be used to evaluate a machine learning model, including:

Accuracy : This metric measures the proportion of correct predictions made by the model. It is often used for classification problems where the goal is to assign a class label to each instance.

Precision and recall : These metrics measure the ability of the model to identify positive instances while avoiding false positives and false negatives, respectively. They are often used in classification problems where there is a class imbalance or when it is important to minimize false positives or false negatives.

F1 Score : The F1 score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall and is a good metric to use when there is an imbalanced class distribution.

Area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC-ROC) : This metric measures the ability of the model to distinguish between positive and negative instances. The ROC curve plots the true positive rate against the false positive rate for a range of threshold values, and the AUC-ROC is the area under this curve.
Mean squared error (MSE) : This metric measures the average squared difference between the predicted values and the true values for a regression problem. The goal is to minimize the MSE to produce accurate predictions.

Mean absolute error (MAE) : This metric measures the average absolute difference between the predicted values and the true values for a regression problem. Like the MSE, the goal is to minimize the MAE to produce accurate predictions.

In addition to these metrics, it is also important to perform a visual analysis of the model's predictions, such as plotting the predicted vs. actual values, to gain a deeper understanding of its performance and identify any patterns or trends in the errors.

It is important to use appropriate metrics that are relevant to the specific problem and to use cross-validation techniques to obtain a more robust estimate of the model's performance. The best way to evaluate a model will depend on the specific problem and the type of data being used.
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