Ok so my doubts about overfitting have been bothering me all day since I made this post so I had to go back and do some more testing.
After expanding the data set, I'm happy to say that the results are still very good. It's interesting how almost perfect results can feel so much better than perfect.
Trend Expanded (16 samples - meme language, POV format)
- ROC-AUC: 1.0000
- Accuracy: 100%, F1: 1.0000
- The model perfectly handles trending slang and meme formats
Crisis Expanded (16 samples - serious issues, safety concerns)
- ROC-AUC: 1.0000
- Accuracy: 93.75%, F1: 0.9412
- 1 false positive on crisis handling, but perfect discrimination
Mixed (20 samples - cross-category blends)
- ROC-AUC: 1.0000
- Accuracy: 100%, F1: 1.0000
- Handles multi-faceted scenarios perfectly
Edge Cases (20 samples - employment, allergens, sustainability)
- ROC-AUC: 0.8600
- Accuracy: 75%, F1: 0.6667
- Conservative behavior: 100% precision but 50% recall
- Misses some on-brand responses in nuanced situations
Overall Performance (72 holdout samples):
- ROC-AUC: 0.9611
- Accuracy: 91.67%
- F1: 0.8943
Key Takeaways:
1. No overfitting detected - The model generalizes excellently to completely new scenarios (0.96 ROC-AUC on holdout vs 1.0 on validation)
2. Edge cases are appropriately harder - Employment questions, allergen safety, and policy questions show 0.86 ROC-AUC, which is expected for these nuanced cases
3. Conservative bias is good - The model has perfect precision (no false positives) but misses some true positives in edge cases. This is better than being over-confident.
4. Training data diversity paid off - Perfect performance on memes, crisis handling, and mixed scenarios suggests the calibration captured the right patterns
P.S. I acknowledge that the 1.000 ROC-AUC is probably overfitting but I think the case study still shows that method has lots of promise. I will be doing some bigger data sets next to really prove it out.
After expanding the data set, I'm happy to say that the results are still very good. It's interesting how almost perfect results can feel so much better than perfect.