Definition:

The term benchmarking is used in machine learning (ML) to refer to the evaluation and comparison of ML methods regarding their ability to learn patterns in ‘benchmark’ datasets that have been applied as ‘standards’. Benchmarking could be thought of simply as a sanity check to confirm that a new method successfully runs as expected and can reliably find simple patterns that existing methods are known to identify [1]. A more rigorous way to view benchmarking is as an approach to identify the respective strengths and weaknesses of a given methodology in contrast with others. Comparisons could be made over a range of evaluation metrics, e.g., power to detect signal, prediction accuracy, computational complexity, and model interpretability. This approach to benchmarking would be important for demonstrating new methodological abilities or simply to guide the selection of an appropriate ML method for a given problem.