60 research outputs found
Structural Return Maximization for Reinforcement Learning
Batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms attempt to choose a policy from
a designer-provided class of policies given a fixed set of training data.
Choosing the policy which maximizes an estimate of return often leads to
over-fitting when only limited data is available, due to the size of the policy
class in relation to the amount of data available. In this work, we focus on
learning policy classes that are appropriately sized to the amount of data
available. We accomplish this by using the principle of Structural Risk
Minimization, from Statistical Learning Theory, which uses Rademacher
complexity to identify a policy class that maximizes a bound on the return of
the best policy in the chosen policy class, given the available data. Unlike
similar batch RL approaches, our bound on return requires only extremely weak
assumptions on the true system
Exact heat kernel on a hypersphere and its applications in kernel SVM
Many contemporary statistical learning methods assume a Euclidean feature
space. This paper presents a method for defining similarity based on
hyperspherical geometry and shows that it often improves the performance of
support vector machine compared to other competing similarity measures.
Specifically, the idea of using heat diffusion on a hypersphere to measure
similarity has been previously proposed, demonstrating promising results based
on a heuristic heat kernel obtained from the zeroth order parametrix expansion;
however, how well this heuristic kernel agrees with the exact hyperspherical
heat kernel remains unknown. This paper presents a higher order parametrix
expansion of the heat kernel on a unit hypersphere and discusses several
problems associated with this expansion method. We then compare the heuristic
kernel with an exact form of the heat kernel expressed in terms of a uniformly
and absolutely convergent series in high-dimensional angular momentum
eigenmodes. Being a natural measure of similarity between sample points
dwelling on a hypersphere, the exact kernel often shows superior performance in
kernel SVM classifications applied to text mining, tumor somatic mutation
imputation, and stock market analysis
On the Quality of Decision Functions in Pattern Recognition
The problem of decision functions quality in pattern recognition is considered. An overview of the
approaches to the solution of this problem is given. Within the Bayesian framework, we suggest an approach
based on the Bayesian interval estimates of quality on a finite set of events
Learning from networked examples
Many machine learning algorithms are based on the assumption that training
examples are drawn independently. However, this assumption does not hold
anymore when learning from a networked sample because two or more training
examples may share some common objects, and hence share the features of these
shared objects. We show that the classic approach of ignoring this problem
potentially can have a harmful effect on the accuracy of statistics, and then
consider alternatives. One of these is to only use independent examples,
discarding other information. However, this is clearly suboptimal. We analyze
sample error bounds in this networked setting, providing significantly improved
results. An important component of our approach is formed by efficient sample
weighting schemes, which leads to novel concentration inequalities
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