My mistake, I thought you were referring to overfitting with the connotation of a deliberate choice, like the manager who thinks he should fit a 9th-degree polynomial to some essentially linear data because “the line gets closer”.
The models used for economic or climate data are usually based on theory, giving them a sensible number of degrees of freedom that may or may not match up with how much calibration data; I would not class this as overfitting in the common use of the term, as all the degrees of freedom do have legitimate reason to be there.
My mistake, I thought you were referring to overfitting with the connotation of a deliberate choice, like the manager who thinks he should fit a 9th-degree polynomial to some essentially linear data because “the line gets closer”.
The models used for economic or climate data are usually based on theory, giving them a sensible number of degrees of freedom that may or may not match up with how much calibration data; I would not class this as overfitting in the common use of the term, as all the degrees of freedom do have legitimate reason to be there.