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Technical GlossaryMachine Learning

Temporal Cross-Validation

An approach that performs chronological validation in time series problems to prevent future information from leaking into the past.

Temporal cross-validation is the fundamental way to evaluate time series models honestly. Random splitting can leak future information into the past and produce artificially strong performance. For that reason, training and validation windows must preserve chronological order. Strong time series modeling requires the right evaluation methodology before it requires a powerful algorithm.