Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Specialty MLS-C01 Question # 3 Topic 1 Discussion

Applying L1 regularization encourages sparsity by penalizing weights directly, often driving many weights to zero. In this case, the ML specialist observes that all weights become zero, which suggests that the L1 regularization parameter is set too high. This high value overly penalizes non-zero weights, effectively removing all features from the model.

To improve the model, the ML specialist should reduce the L1 regularization parameter, allowing some features to retain non-zero weights. This adjustment will make the model less prone to excessive sparsity, allowing it to better capture essential patterns in the data without dropping all features. Introducing L2 regularization is another approach but may not directly resolve this specific issue of all-zero weights as effectively as reducing L1.