What is Elastic Net and when should it be preferred over Ridge and Lasso?

Elastic Net combines L1 and L2 penalties to balance sparsity and stability.

Elastic Net uses λ₁||β||₁ + λ₂||β||². It inherits sparsity from Lasso and stability from Ridge, making it effective when features are correlated or p >> n. It avoids Lasso’s instability in grouped features.