Bias vs. variance decomposition for regression and classification

In this chapter, the important concepts of bias and variance are introduced. After an intuitive introduction to the bias/variance tradeoff, we discuss the bias/variance decompositions of the mean square error (in the context of regression problems) and of the mean misclassification error (in the context of classification problems). Then, we carry out a small empirical study providing some insight about how the parameters of a learning algorithm nfluence bias and variance.