What is a Learning Curve in machine learning?

Question

I want to know what a learning curve in machine learning is. What is the standard way of plotting it? I mean what should be the x and y axis of my plot?

Answer 1

Basically, a machine learning curve allows you to find the point from which the algorithm starts to learn. If you take a curve and then slice a slope tangent for derivative at the point that it starts to reach constant is when it starts to build its learning ability.

Depending on how your x and y axis are mapped, one of your axis will start to approach a constant value while the other axis's values will keep increasing. This is when you start seeing some learning. The whole curve pretty much allows you to measure the rate at which your algorithm is able to learn. The maximum point is usually when the slope starts to recede. You can take a number of derivative measures to the maximum/minimum point.

So from the above examples you can see that the curve is gradually tending towards a constant value. It initially starts to harness its learning through the training examples and the slope widens at maximum/mimimum point where it tends to approach closer and closer towards the constant state. At this point it is able to pick up new examples from test data and find new and unique results from data. You would have such x/y axis measures for epochs vs error.