PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A grocery chain trains an image classifier to spot damaged produce. Over 60 epochs, training accuracy rises from 82% to 99%. Validation accuracy peaks at 88% near epoch 20 and then falls to 81%.
Which action should the team take?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Increase regularization and keep the model from the validation peak.
Training accuracy that keeps rising while validation accuracy starts to decrease is the signature of overfitting: the model is memorizing the training set rather than learning patterns that generalize. AWS documents increasing regularization as the adjustment for this, and the version from the validation peak is the one that generalizes best. Training longer or scoring on the training data hides the problem.