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Auto Model: Performance is worse when auto feature selection / generation turned on?

cramsdencramsden Member Posts: 42 Contributor I
in Help
Hello, I am new to the machine learning world am self teaching myself by playing around with rapid miner studio.  I have just noticed something that doesn't seem to make sense to me and am hoping someone could explain it to me. 

I put the same data set in auto model and at first ran it with 'automatic feature selection / generation' turned off, then I ran it again with feature selection/generation turned on.  

When 'automatic feature selection / generation' was turned on the performance of the model was worse than when it was off.  I am a bit confused why adding feature selection / generation would potentially make a model worse, if there aren't any features that improve the performance of the model would they not just be rejected and the original model would come out, so the performance should only be the same or better?

Again I am very new to this and am just a bit confused here,  any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you
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    MartinLiebigMartinLiebig Administrator, Moderator, Employee, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, RapidMiner Certified Expert, University Professor Posts: 3,507 RM Data Scientist
    Hi,
    just a thought: Might be that the FS is actually overtraining the model and thus the testing error is worse.

    Cheers,
    Martin
    - Sr. Director Data Solutions, Altair RapidMiner -
    Dortmund, Germany
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    cramsdencramsden Member Posts: 42 Contributor I
    My thought was if the FS didn't make any improvements it would just stick with the basic model?   Maybe I am confused about how the training / testing all works though.  Again I am very new to this and just playing around
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    MartinLiebigMartinLiebig Administrator, Moderator, Employee, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, RapidMiner Certified Expert, University Professor Posts: 3,507 RM Data Scientist
    Hi,
    i usually tend to think about model fitting and feature selection as one thing which needs to be seen together. So adding FS to your model increases the 'degrees of freedom' of your model generation method. More degrees of freedom means more options to overfit.

    BR,
    Martin
    - Sr. Director Data Solutions, Altair RapidMiner -
    Dortmund, Germany
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    cramsdencramsden Member Posts: 42 Contributor I
    Ah, Ok so the results of the models I am seeing, the correlation, rmse etc.  are all based off of a subset of the data that is held back? 

    I was thinking it was picking the best model based on those results, so that must be where I was confused.
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