Test error lower than training error
Would appreciate your input on this. I am constructing a regression model with the help of genetic programming.
If my RMSE on test data is (much) lower than my RMSE on training data for a 1:5 ratio of data, should I be worried?
The test data is drawn randomly without replacement from a set of 24 data points. The model was built using genetic programming technique so the number of features, modeling framework etc vary as I minimize the training RMSE regularized by the number of nodes in the GP tree.
Is the model underfitted? Or should I have minimized MSE instead of RMSE (I thought it would be the same as MSE is positive and the minimum of MSE would coincide with the minimum of RMSE assuming the optimizer is good enough to find the minimum)?
Tks
Answer
So your model is trained on 20 out of 24 data points and tested on the 4 remaining data points?
To me it sounds like you need (much) more data, so you can have a larger train and test sets. I'm not surprised by the low performance on your test set as it seems that your model wasn't able to learn from such few data. As a rule of thumb, for machine learning you can never have enough data. Is it a possibility to gather a larger dataset?