Suppose we have a model with one or more unknown parameters, and a data set to which the model can be fit (the training data set). The fitting process optimizes the model parameters to make the model fit the training data as well as possible. If we then take an independent sample of validation data from the same population as where the training data have been taken, it will generally turn out that the model does not fit the validation data as well as it fits the training data. The size of this difference is likely to be large especially when the size of the training data set is small, or when the number of parameters in the model is large. Cross-validation is a way to estimate the size of this effect.