How important is set.seed

If you are using the program for data analysis then set.seed() is not
necessary unless you are developing a reproducible example. In a standard
analysis it is mostly counter-productive because one should then ask if
your presented results are an artifact of a specific seed that you selected
to get a particular result. However, in cases where you need a reproducible
example, debugging a program, or specific other cases where you might need
the same result with every run of the program then set.seed() is an
essential tool.
Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help <r-help-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf Of Jeff Newmiller
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2022 8:41 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org; Neha gupta <neha.bologna90 at gmail.com>; r-help
mailing list <r-help at r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [R] How important is set.seed

[External Email]

First off, "ML models" do not all use random numbers (for prediction I
would guess very few of them do). Learn and pay attention to what the
functions you are using do.

Second, if you use random numbers properly and understand the precision
that your specific use case offers, then you don't need to use set.seed.
However, in practice, using set.seed can allow you to temporarily avoid
chasing precision gremlins, or set up specific test cases for testing code,
not results. It is your responsibility to not let this become a crutch... a
randomized simulation that is actually sensitive to the seed is unlikely to
offer an accurate result.

Where to put set.seed depends a lot on how you are performing your
simulations. In general each process should set it once uniquely at the
beginning, and if you use parallel processing then use the features of your
parallel processing framework to insure that this happens. Beware of
setting all worker processes to use the same seed.

On March 21, 2022 5:03:30 PM PDT, Neha gupta <neha.bologna90 at gmail.com>
wrote:

Hello everyone

I want to know

(1) In which cases, we need to use set.seed while building ML models?

(2) Which is the exact location we need to put the set.seed function i.e.
when we split data into train/test sets, or just before we train a model?

Thank you

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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.