15,915 research outputs found
The Computational Power of Optimization in Online Learning
We consider the fundamental problem of prediction with expert advice where
the experts are "optimizable": there is a black-box optimization oracle that
can be used to compute, in constant time, the leading expert in retrospect at
any point in time. In this setting, we give a novel online algorithm that
attains vanishing regret with respect to experts in total
computation time. We also give a lower bound showing
that this running time cannot be improved (up to log factors) in the oracle
model, thereby exhibiting a quadratic speedup as compared to the standard,
oracle-free setting where the required time for vanishing regret is
. These results demonstrate an exponential gap between
the power of optimization in online learning and its power in statistical
learning: in the latter, an optimization oracle---i.e., an efficient empirical
risk minimizer---allows to learn a finite hypothesis class of size in time
. We also study the implications of our results to learning in
repeated zero-sum games, in a setting where the players have access to oracles
that compute, in constant time, their best-response to any mixed strategy of
their opponent. We show that the runtime required for approximating the minimax
value of the game in this setting is , yielding
again a quadratic improvement upon the oracle-free setting, where
is known to be tight
Universal Learning of Repeated Matrix Games
We study and compare the learning dynamics of two universal learning
algorithms, one based on Bayesian learning and the other on prediction with
expert advice. Both approaches have strong asymptotic performance guarantees.
When confronted with the task of finding good long-term strategies in repeated
2x2 matrix games, they behave quite differently.Comment: 16 LaTeX pages, 8 eps figure
Optimality of Universal Bayesian Sequence Prediction for General Loss and Alphabet
Various optimality properties of universal sequence predictors based on
Bayes-mixtures in general, and Solomonoff's prediction scheme in particular,
will be studied. The probability of observing at time , given past
observations can be computed with the chain rule if the true
generating distribution of the sequences is known. If
is unknown, but known to belong to a countable or continuous class \M
one can base ones prediction on the Bayes-mixture defined as a
-weighted sum or integral of distributions \nu\in\M. The cumulative
expected loss of the Bayes-optimal universal prediction scheme based on
is shown to be close to the loss of the Bayes-optimal, but infeasible
prediction scheme based on . We show that the bounds are tight and that no
other predictor can lead to significantly smaller bounds. Furthermore, for
various performance measures, we show Pareto-optimality of and give an
Occam's razor argument that the choice for the weights
is optimal, where is the length of the shortest program describing
. The results are applied to games of chance, defined as a sequence of
bets, observations, and rewards. The prediction schemes (and bounds) are
compared to the popular predictors based on expert advice. Extensions to
infinite alphabets, partial, delayed and probabilistic prediction,
classification, and more active systems are briefly discussed.Comment: 34 page
Justification of Logarithmic Loss via the Benefit of Side Information
We consider a natural measure of relevance: the reduction in optimal
prediction risk in the presence of side information. For any given loss
function, this relevance measure captures the benefit of side information for
performing inference on a random variable under this loss function. When such a
measure satisfies a natural data processing property, and the random variable
of interest has alphabet size greater than two, we show that it is uniquely
characterized by the mutual information, and the corresponding loss function
coincides with logarithmic loss. In doing so, our work provides a new
characterization of mutual information, and justifies its use as a measure of
relevance. When the alphabet is binary, we characterize the only admissible
forms the measure of relevance can assume while obeying the specified data
processing property. Our results naturally extend to measuring causal influence
between stochastic processes, where we unify different causal-inference
measures in the literature as instantiations of directed information
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