To prevent overfitting, the process of _______ is used to simplify the models by penalizing complex ones.

To prevent overfitting, the process of regularization is used. Regularization techniques, such as L1 (Lasso) and L2 (Ridge) regularization, penalize complex models by adding a penalty term to the loss function. This helps in simplifying the model and improving its generalization to new, unseen data.