Leave One Out (LOO) cross-validation Setting K = n (the number of observations) yields n-fold and is called leave-one out cross- validation (LOO), a special case of the K-fold approach. LOO CV is sometimes useful but typically doesn't shake up the data enough. The estimates from each fold are highly correlated and hence their average can have high variance. This is why the usual choice is K=5 or 10. It provides a good compromise for the bias-variance tradeoff.