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In data pre-processing, stratified shuffle is used to ensure that the distribution of the original dataset is reflected in the training, test and validation dataset.

Mini-batch gradient descent uses random shuffling to ensure randomness in the mini-batches.

My doubt is- Why should we implement stratified shuffle on our dataset if it is going to be shuffled in a random manner later during training?

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It doesn't, the workflow when training a model is like that:

  1. Create 10 evenly distributed splits from the dataset using stratified shuffle
  2. train set = 8 splits; validation set = 1 split; test set = 1 split
  3. Shuffle the train set and the validation set and create minibatches from them
  4. Train for one epoch using the batches
  5. Repeat from step 3 until all epochs are over
  6. Evaluate the model using the test set

If we skip the stratified shuffling in step 1 the classes of the train set, validation set and test set wont be evenly distributed.

If we skip the shuffling before each epoch in step 3 the mini-batches in each epoch will be the same.

The proportions of the train set, validation set and test set can of course vary.

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    $\begingroup$ Correct me if I am wrong, based on your answer I deduce that stratification is done mainly to keep the distribution intact in validation as well as test dataset. It does not cause issues during training. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 9, 2020 at 13:03
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, it doesn't cause issues during training. It's only done so the train set, validation set and test set are similary distributed. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 9, 2020 at 17:25
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    $\begingroup$ All stratified StratifiedShuffleSplit does is shuffle the data randomly, then create x splits which have the same class distributions. So if your dataset has 80% rows from class A and 20% rows from class B it makes sure each of the x splits also has 80% rows from class A and 20% rows from class B. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 9, 2020 at 17:33

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