# What are Machine learning model characteristics?

This question I have received in some Machine Learning related interview and Here is the question

What questions would you ask to learn about machine learning model characteristics?

This is what I think:

I did a bit research on the internet & found this resource, but still not very clear about How ML model characteristics are equivalent to asking trade-off between different algorithms in supervised learning settings. What I understood and framed my answer is:

1. First, for simplicity, I assumed that this model is used for some supervised learning task(classification/ regression) then,

1. I would first try to find a learning algorithm used to create this model, because this will provide me with a clue of the created model and help me to talk about different issues within it(such as,

• How complex or simple your model is(feature engineering!)?

• What are your training & test errors(Model performance)

Both will help me to talk about the bias vs variance trade-off.

2. Furthermore, I could talk about different learning algorithm trade-offs in supervised settings.

• Is the model based on identifying correlations i.e output variable can be expressed in terms of the linear/non-linear combination of features? (targeting linear regression, logistic regression, SVM or Neural network algorithms, or
• it's decision tree-based algorithms.

I am not confident enough that my answer is complete or correct (since I am not able to understand what precisely characteristics of a model are?), so I need this community's help to provide feedback! please feel free to add your suggestion to it!

• It's hard to follow your post and understand what you are asking. It seems that you have a question about a question $Q$ and the answer $A$ that you provided to $Q$. Can you more clearly write your post so that both $Q$ and $A$ are clearly stated? One way to check if your writing is clear is to ask a friend who is not a machine learning or statistics specialist to read the post; if they understand the gist and can explain the post to you, then the post is probably clear enough. – Sycorax Jan 2 at 0:51
• @Sycorax, thanks for your suggestion, I have re-written it!. I provided answer A to the question Q and asked for community support to provide a suggestion if it is incorrect or incomplete. I hope it is clear this time. :) – anu Jan 2 at 1:21