Baby’s First Machine Learning Metric

Introducing residuals and the mean squared error (MSE)

“MSE.” Not “messy.” Well, this particular one is messy too, I guess. Original photo by hui sang on Unsplash, modified by author.

The mean squared error (MSE) is one of many metrics you could use to measure your model’s performance. If you take a machine learning class, chances are you’ll come across it very early in the syllabus — it’s usually baby’s first loss function for continuous data.