4 research outputs found
Near-Optimal Algorithms for Online Matrix Prediction
In several online prediction problems of recent interest the comparison class
is composed of matrices with bounded entries. For example, in the online
max-cut problem, the comparison class is matrices which represent cuts of a
given graph and in online gambling the comparison class is matrices which
represent permutations over n teams. Another important example is online
collaborative filtering in which a widely used comparison class is the set of
matrices with a small trace norm. In this paper we isolate a property of
matrices, which we call (beta,tau)-decomposability, and derive an efficient
online learning algorithm, that enjoys a regret bound of O*(sqrt(beta tau T))
for all problems in which the comparison class is composed of
(beta,tau)-decomposable matrices. By analyzing the decomposability of cut
matrices, triangular matrices, and low trace-norm matrices, we derive near
optimal regret bounds for online max-cut, online gambling, and online
collaborative filtering. In particular, this resolves (in the affirmative) an
open problem posed by Abernethy (2010); Kleinberg et al (2010). Finally, we
derive lower bounds for the three problems and show that our upper bounds are
optimal up to logarithmic factors. In particular, our lower bound for the
online collaborative filtering problem resolves another open problem posed by
Shamir and Srebro (2011).Comment: 25 page
Hierarchies of Relaxations for Online Prediction Problems with Evolving Constraints
We study online prediction where regret of the algorithm is measured against
a benchmark defined via evolving constraints. This framework captures online
prediction on graphs, as well as other prediction problems with combinatorial
structure. A key aspect here is that finding the optimal benchmark predictor
(even in hindsight, given all the data) might be computationally hard due to
the combinatorial nature of the constraints. Despite this, we provide
polynomial-time \emph{prediction} algorithms that achieve low regret against
combinatorial benchmark sets. We do so by building improper learning algorithms
based on two ideas that work together. The first is to alleviate part of the
computational burden through random playout, and the second is to employ
Lasserre semidefinite hierarchies to approximate the resulting integer program.
Interestingly, for our prediction algorithms, we only need to compute the
values of the semidefinite programs and not the rounded solutions. However, the
integrality gap for Lasserre hierarchy \emph{does} enter the generic regret
bound in terms of Rademacher complexity of the benchmark set. This establishes
a trade-off between the computation time and the regret bound of the algorithm