7 research outputs found
Tight Lower Bounds for Multiplicative Weights Algorithmic Families
We study the fundamental problem of prediction with expert advice and develop
regret lower bounds for a large family of algorithms for this problem. We
develop simple adversarial primitives, that lend themselves to various
combinations leading to sharp lower bounds for many algorithmic families. We
use these primitives to show that the classic Multiplicative Weights Algorithm
(MWA) has a regret of , there by completely closing
the gap between upper and lower bounds. We further show a regret lower bound of
for a much more general family of
algorithms than MWA, where the learning rate can be arbitrarily varied over
time, or even picked from arbitrary distributions over time. We also use our
primitives to construct adversaries in the geometric horizon setting for MWA to
precisely characterize the regret at for the case
of experts and a lower bound of
for the case of arbitrary number of experts
Online Learning with an Almost Perfect Expert
We study the multiclass online learning problem where a forecaster makes a
sequence of predictions using the advice of experts. Our main contribution
is to analyze the regime where the best expert makes at most mistakes and
to show that when , the expected number of mistakes made by
the optimal forecaster is at most . We also describe
an adversary strategy showing that this bound is tight and that the worst case
is attained for binary prediction
Learning with Continuous Experts Using Drifting Games
Abstract. We consider the problem of learning to predict as well as the best in a group of experts making continuous predictions. We assume the learning algorithm has prior knowledge of the maximum number of mistakes of the best expert. We propose a new master strategy that achieves the best known performance for online learning with continuous experts in the mistake bounded model. Our ideas are based on drifting games, a generalization of boosting and online learning algorithms. We also prove new lower bounds based on the drifting games framework which, though not as tight as previous bounds, have simpler proofs and do not require an enormous number of experts.