K-Fold Cross-Validation is a technique used in machine learning for assessing the performance and generalization ability of a predictive model. It involves splitting a dataset into ‘K’ equal-sized subsets, or folds. The model is then trained and evaluated ‘K’ times, each time using a different fold as the validation set while the remaining K-1 folds are used for training. This process is repeated until each fold has been used as the validation set exactly once.
The primary goal of K-Fold Cross-Validation is to obtain a more robust estimate of a model’s performance by reducing the risk of overfitting and ensuring that the model’s evaluation is not dependent on a single random split of the data. The performance metrics obtained from each of the ‘K’ iterations are typically averaged to produce a final performance measure, such as accuracy or mean squared error. This provides a more reliable assessment of how well the model is expected to perform on unseen data and helps in identifying issues like overfitting or underfitting. Common values for ‘K’ include 5 and 10, but the choice of ‘K’ can vary depending on the specific dataset and computational resources available.