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I performed a holdout cross-validation analysis on a multilevel model fit. The purpose of this was to show that we didn't have a problem with over-fitting, for which it worked just fine. Now we are writing it up for publication and I need a citation to support my methodology. I am looking for a good canonical statistical reference, ideally a book, that does a nice job explaining why holdout cross-validation is a real thing that people do and makes sense in this application. The paper will be published in a biological journal, so I am looking to point non-statistical types to a general reference. Somehow, none of my books seem to quite do it. The wikipedia entry would be perfectly adequate for my purpose, but I'd rather not cite wikipedia. Any suggestions?

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    $\begingroup$ "Holdout" and "cross-validation" are slightly contradictory. Most people who use the term "holdout sample" are done 1-fold cross-validation, a highly inefficient approach. Please clarify. 100 repeats of 10-fold cross-validation, or the bootstrap, would be good approaches. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 13:13

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I find chapter 7 of Hastie, Tibshirani, Friedman's Elements of Statistical Learning to be a good reference for CV and how and why it is used.

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks. This will work nicely and it looks like a great book too; I'll probably actually buy it (!). $\endgroup$
    – yolio
    Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 18:11
  • $\begingroup$ @yolio, it's always nice to have a physical copy, and it's nice to support the authors for their work, but also note that the authors have put a copy in pdf format on their website. On the page supplied above, click "download the book". $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 13, 2012 at 18:23

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