An illustration of the bias-variance tradeoff. Assume two people (sober) shooting at a target in, say, Texas. The left shooter has a bias, a systematic “error,” but on balance gets closer to the target than the right shooter, who has no systematic bias but a high variance. Typically, you cannot reduce one without increasing the other. When fragile, the strategy at the left is the best: maintain a distance from ruin, that is, from hitting a point in the periphery should it be dangerous. This schema explains why if you want to minimize the probability of the plane crashing, you may make mistakes
...more
