In our previous article , we showed that generalized linear models are unbiased, or calibrated: they preserve the conditional expectations and rollups of the training data. A calibrated model is important in many applications, particularly when financial data is involved.
However, when making predictions on individuals, a biased model may be preferable; biased models may be more accurate, or make predictions with lower relative error than an unbiased model. For example, tree-based ensemble models tend to be highly accurate, and are often the modeling approach of choice for many machine learning applications. In this note, we will show that tree-based models are biased, or uncalibrated. This means they may not always represent the best bias/variance trade-off.
Read on for an example.