The key is to realize that there was nothing special about the first training/test split we made. Let’s say we are saving the test set for a final assessment. We can take the training set and split it again into a training subset and a testing subset. Then we can build models on this training subset and pick the best model based on this testing subset. Let’s call the former the sub-training set and the latter the validation set for clarity. The validation set is separate from the final test set, on which we are never going to make any modeling decisions. This procedure is often called nested
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