The efficacy of any machine learning model can primarily be attributed to the validity of the data used for training and the model’s ability to generalize well from this information. Therefore, training a model with the lowest validation loss is critical. By training a model effectively, we are ensuring that the model is neither underfitting nor overfitting.
The validation loss corresponds to the error rate on a hold-out sample of the training set which is not used in training phase and helps us measure the model’s ability to generalize. The primary goal in any machine learning model is to achieve the lowest validation loss, thereby indicating that our model is learning and generalizing well.