Irreverent Demystifiers

Is There Always a Tradeoff Between Bias and Variance?

The bias-variance tradeoff, part 1 of 3

Cassie Kozyrkov
4 min readFeb 15, 2023

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Should you read this article? If you understand all the words in the next section, then no. If you don’t care to understand them, then also no. If you want the bolded bits explained, then yes.

The bias-variance tradeoff

“The bias-variance tradeoff” is a popular phrase you’ll hear in the context of ML/AI. If you’re a statistician, you might…

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Chief Decision Scientist, Google. ❤️ Stats, ML/AI, data, puns, art, theatre, decision science. All views are my own. twitter.com/quaesita