overfit

American  

[ohv-er-fit] / ˈoʊv ərˌfɪt /

verb (used with object)

overfitted, overfitting

1. Artificial Intelligence. to model (training data) such that the resulting system captures noise, incidental patterns, or idiosyncratic features of the training set, thereby reducing its ability to generalize accurately.

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Other Word Forms

• overfitment
  noun
• overfitted
  adjective

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

overfitted overfitting

At times Evan felt underfitted for the bank, and at other times overfitted.

From A Canadian Bankclerk by J. P. Buschlen

Researchers from Zhejiang University argue that Centaur's apparent success may come from overfitting.

From Science Daily ● Apr. 30, 2026

By checking the machine learning model’s performance on this validation dataset, developers can ensure that the model is able to generalize its learning beyond the training data, avoiding overfitting.

From Salon ● Jun. 1, 2024

Or is this the very type of big idea that’s trying too hard, overfitting the data?

From New York Times ● Nov. 9, 2020

Stolovitzky calls this the “self-assessment trap”, which can lead to mistakes such as overfitting models to one set of data.

From Nature ● May 10, 2016

Google’s techniques, it turned out, were vulnerable to so-called overfitting, meaning the search engine tended to count irrelevant searches as matches.

From BusinessWeek ● Apr. 17, 2014