What is overfitting in cost functions?

Updated May 15, 2026

Short answer

Overfitting occurs when cost is minimized on training data but generalization fails.

Deep explanation

The model learns noise instead of true patterns, leading to low training cost but high validation cost.

Real-world example

Stock prediction models fitting historical noise.

Common mistakes

  • Assuming low training loss guarantees good performance.

Follow-up questions

  • How to detect overfitting?
  • How to reduce it?

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