Solved – AIC, BIC, DIC, model selection criteria

aicbicfeature selectionmodel selectionpredictive-models

I am trying to understand the difference between these parameters, and their application. Was hoping to get some correction/clarification to my statements. I have a training set and cross-validation set. I am using bayesian statistics, I realize AIC and BIC can't be used in this context.

AIC and BIC assess how well the model fits the training set. The DIC assess how well the model will fit some future data (ie the cross-validation set).

So if using MLE methods, should one compute AIC and BIC on the cross-validation set? Conversely, when using bayesian methods, is there no need to compute the DIC for the cross-validation set because it by definition is related to future data?

Thanks

Mark

Best Answer

If you are using cross validation, there's usually no need to compute the AIC or the BIC. The goal of using AIC or BIC is to find the model that will do the best on future data. But cross-validation already gives you a pretty good idea of which models do well on future data (namely those with a low cross-validation error). So you can just pick your model by cross-validation, and not worry about the AIC or BIC.