1,671 research outputs found
A Tight Excess Risk Bound via a Unified PAC-Bayesian-Rademacher-Shtarkov-MDL Complexity
We present a novel notion of complexity that interpolates between and
generalizes some classic existing complexity notions in learning theory: for
estimators like empirical risk minimization (ERM) with arbitrary bounded
losses, it is upper bounded in terms of data-independent Rademacher complexity;
for generalized Bayesian estimators, it is upper bounded by the data-dependent
information complexity (also known as stochastic or PAC-Bayesian,
complexity. For
(penalized) ERM, the new complexity reduces to (generalized) normalized maximum
likelihood (NML) complexity, i.e. a minimax log-loss individual-sequence
regret. Our first main result bounds excess risk in terms of the new
complexity. Our second main result links the new complexity via Rademacher
complexity to entropy, thereby generalizing earlier results of Opper,
Haussler, Lugosi, and Cesa-Bianchi who did the log-loss case with .
Together, these results recover optimal bounds for VC- and large (polynomial
entropy) classes, replacing localized Rademacher complexity by a simpler
analysis which almost completely separates the two aspects that determine the
achievable rates: 'easiness' (Bernstein) conditions and model complexity.Comment: 38 page
Kernel conditional quantile estimation via reduction revisited
Quantile regression refers to the process of estimating the quantiles of a conditional distribution and has many important applications within econometrics and data mining, among other domains. In this paper, we show how to estimate these conditional quantile functions within a Bayes risk minimization framework using a Gaussian process prior. The resulting non-parametric probabilistic model is easy to implement and allows non-crossing quantile functions to be enforced. Moreover, it can directly be used in combination with tools and extensions of standard Gaussian Processes such as principled hyperparameter estimation, sparsification, and quantile regression with input-dependent noise rates. No existing approach enjoys all of these desirable properties. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art approaches.
On the Bayes-optimality of F-measure maximizers
The F-measure, which has originally been introduced in information retrieval,
is nowadays routinely used as a performance metric for problems such as binary
classification, multi-label classification, and structured output prediction.
Optimizing this measure is a statistically and computationally challenging
problem, since no closed-form solution exists. Adopting a decision-theoretic
perspective, this article provides a formal and experimental analysis of
different approaches for maximizing the F-measure. We start with a Bayes-risk
analysis of related loss functions, such as Hamming loss and subset zero-one
loss, showing that optimizing such losses as a surrogate of the F-measure leads
to a high worst-case regret. Subsequently, we perform a similar type of
analysis for F-measure maximizing algorithms, showing that such algorithms are
approximate, while relying on additional assumptions regarding the statistical
distribution of the binary response variables. Furthermore, we present a new
algorithm which is not only computationally efficient but also Bayes-optimal,
regardless of the underlying distribution. To this end, the algorithm requires
only a quadratic (with respect to the number of binary responses) number of
parameters of the joint distribution. We illustrate the practical performance
of all analyzed methods by means of experiments with multi-label classification
problems
Valuation Compressions in VCG-Based Combinatorial Auctions
The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation
mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful
direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism.
For many valuation spaces computing the allocation and payments of the VCG
mechanism, however, is a computationally hard problem. We thus study the
performance of the VCG mechanism when bidders are forced to choose bids from a
subspace of the valuation space for which the VCG outcome can be computed
efficiently. We prove improved upper bounds on the welfare loss for
restrictions to additive bids and upper and lower bounds for restrictions to
non-additive bids. These bounds show that the welfare loss increases in
expressiveness. All our bounds apply to equilibrium concepts that can be
computed in polynomial time as well as to learning outcomes
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