# Two good questions (with good answers) about fitting after cross validation: to which should we point the dupes?

These two questions answer are very similar, and each has a good, highly upvoted, accepted answer: How to choose a predictive model after k-fold cross-validation?, and Training with the full dataset after cross-validation?.

It's also been pointed in comments to both questions that they are similar, and suggested they'd been merged somehow to keep the answers (I don't know if it's possible), or just mark one as a duplicate of the other (but protecting it from deletion).

The topic might be basic but it is active - I've marked two questions as duplicates while looking around for it. I marked them as duplicates of the first one (the answer seemed more straight-forward to me...), but it will be simpler to deal with (even for new users) if there's a single target for marking duplicates.

• If answers to one will serve as answers to the other, the questions should normally be merged under the best (most canonical) version of the question. – Glen_b Dec 30 '19 at 4:03
• Merge as in meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19977/… ? – Itamar Mushkin Dec 30 '19 at 10:47
• It's talking about the same kind of thing, though the process in the answer there is more involved and formal that what has usually happened in practice here for most merges (it's a good process though). More directly, merging is something a moderator can do (e.g. in response to a flag or because they conclude there's a need to do so themselves), which copies all the answers to one question into the answers on another question, and marks the question those answers came from (the source) as having been merged. Ideally the target post is already in a state suitable to act as a canonical question – Glen_b Dec 30 '19 at 14:43
• ... at the time, but it can be edited (as suggested at the link you offer) to make it so. However, we don't have a canonical-answer tag. We do have a canonical-question tag, though, if it is one, but many of our merged questions don't have it. – Glen_b Dec 30 '19 at 14:44
• Thank you for your explanation. I didn't find a specific flag to suggest a merge, so I flagged a moderator with an explanation. The question might be considered canonical, but since we only have two questions with the canonical-question tag to use as an example, I don't really think I can judge that. – Itamar Mushkin Dec 31 '19 at 6:22
• Sounds like the right kind of thing to do. If you're not sure about the tag, just leave it. – Glen_b Dec 31 '19 at 6:37
• IMHO these two Qs can and should be merged, as I commented over there back in 2016 ;) It's a tough call to choose the merging target because both have good and accepted answers and both threads are well upvoted. However, one has considerably more views and more upvotes; I think that one should be used as the merging target. CC @Glen_b-ReinstateMonica. – amoeba Jan 3 at 21:05