Why does regularization improve generalization performance in data science?

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Why does regularization improve generalization performance in data science?

Asked on Nov 06, 2025

Answer

Regularization improves generalization performance by adding a penalty to the model's complexity, which helps prevent overfitting to the training data. This is particularly useful in machine learning models where the goal is to ensure that the model performs well on unseen data by balancing the fit and complexity.

Example Concept: Regularization techniques, such as L1 (Lasso) and L2 (Ridge) regularization, add a penalty term to the loss function of a model. This penalty discourages overly complex models by either shrinking the coefficients of less important features (L1) or reducing the overall magnitude of coefficients (L2). By controlling the complexity, regularization helps the model generalize better to new data, thus improving predictive performance on unseen datasets.

Additional Comment:

Regularization is especially useful in high-dimensional datasets where the risk of overfitting is higher.
Choosing the right regularization parameter is crucial and often involves techniques like cross-validation.
Regularization can also help in feature selection, as seen with L1 regularization, which can shrink some feature coefficients to zero.

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