The extra validation set is useless: cross-validation can pick both your model and your number of…

📰 Medium · Data Science

Learn why a separate validation set may not be necessary for early stopping and how cross-validation can be used instead

intermediate Published 20 Jul 2026
Action Steps
  1. Read the original Medium post to understand the heretical claim
  2. Apply cross-validation to pick both your model and the number of parameters
  3. Configure your model development workflow to use cross-validation for early stopping
  4. Test the performance of your model using cross-validation
  5. Compare the results with and without a separate validation set
Who Needs to Know This

Data scientists and machine learning engineers can benefit from this insight to optimize their model development workflow

Key Insight

💡 Cross-validation can be used for early stopping, eliminating the need for a separate validation set

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💡 Cross-validation can pick both your model and number of parameters, making a separate validation set unnecessary #MachineLearning #DataScience

Key Takeaways

Learn why a separate validation set may not be necessary for early stopping and how cross-validation can be used instead

Full Article

A few years ago I wrote a short Medium post with a slightly heretical claim: you don’t need a separate held-out set for early stopping (to… Continue reading on Medium »
Read full article → ← Back to Reads

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