New to ML and I would like to know what I'm missing or doing incorrectly.
I'm trying to figure out why my data is being underfit when applying early stopping and dropout however when I don't use earlystopping or dropout the fit seems to be okay...
Dataset I'm using: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kanths028/usa-housing
Model Parameters: The dataset has 5 features to train on and the target is the price I chose 4 layers arbitrarily Epochs at 600 (way too many) because I want to test early stopping Optimizers and loss because those seemed to get me the most consistent results when compared to SKLearns LinearRegression (MAE is about 81K)
Data Pre-preprocessing:
X = df[df.columns[:-2]].values
y = df['Price'].values
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.30, random_state=42)
scaler = MinMaxScaler()
X_train = scaler.fit_transform(X_train)
X_test = scaler.transform(X_test)
Fit looks okay:
model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(5, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(5, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(5, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(5, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(1))
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='mae')
model.fit(X_train, y_train, validation_data=(X_test, y_test), epochs=600)
Data looks underfit with earlystopping and dropout combined:
model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(10, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(0.2))
model.add(Dense(10, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(0.2))
model.add(Dense(10, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(0.2))
model.add(Dense(10, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(0.2))
model.add(Dense(1))
early_stopping = EarlyStopping(monitor='val_loss', mode='min', patience=25)
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='mae')
model.fit(X_train, y_train, validation_data=(X_test, y_test), epochs=600, callbacks=[early_stopping])
I'm trying to figure out why early stopping would stop when the results are so far off. I would guess that the model would continue until the end of the 600 epochs however early stopping pulls the plug around 300.
I'm probably doing something wrong but I can't figure it out so any insights would be appreciated. Thank you in advance :)

