A derivation of the bias-variance decomposition of test error in machine learning.

analysis.ipynb

An entirely analogous result to that outlined in this gist is obtained when one computes the error of an estimator of a parameter. Namely the mean square error of any estimator is equal to its variance plus (the square of) its bias. See section 7.7 at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123948113500071

In active machine learning, we assume that the learner is unbiased, and focus on algorithms that minimize the learner's variance, as shown in Cohn et al (1996): https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/9603104 (Eq. 4 is difficult to interpret precisely, though, in the absence of further reading).

This analysis presented in this gist has also been published on Cross Validated: https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/287904/146385

Also see the section entitled "The Bias-Variance Decomposition" in Christopher Bishop's 2006 book: https://link.springer.com/book/9780387310732