Optimizing Partial Area Under the Top-k Curve: Theory and Practice

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Wang, Zitai, Xu, Qianqian, Yang, Zhiyong, He, Yuan, Cao, Xiaochun, Huang, Qingming
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866929415265452032
author Wang, Zitai
Xu, Qianqian
Yang, Zhiyong
He, Yuan
Cao, Xiaochun
Huang, Qingming
author_facet Wang, Zitai
Xu, Qianqian
Yang, Zhiyong
He, Yuan
Cao, Xiaochun
Huang, Qingming
contents Top-k error has become a popular metric for large-scale classification benchmarks due to the inevitable semantic ambiguity among classes. Existing literature on top-k optimization generally focuses on the optimization method of the top-k objective, while ignoring the limitations of the metric itself. In this paper, we point out that the top-k objective lacks enough discrimination such that the induced predictions may give a totally irrelevant label a top rank. To fix this issue, we develop a novel metric named partial Area Under the top-k Curve (AUTKC). Theoretical analysis shows that AUTKC has a better discrimination ability, and its Bayes optimal score function could give a correct top-K ranking with respect to the conditional probability. This shows that AUTKC does not allow irrelevant labels to appear in the top list. Furthermore, we present an empirical surrogate risk minimization framework to optimize the proposed metric. Theoretically, we present (1) a sufficient condition for Fisher consistency of the Bayes optimal score function; (2) a generalization upper bound which is insensitive to the number of classes under a simple hyperparameter setting. Finally, the experimental results on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_01398
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimizing Partial Area Under the Top-k Curve: Theory and Practice
Wang, Zitai
Xu, Qianqian
Yang, Zhiyong
He, Yuan
Cao, Xiaochun
Huang, Qingming
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Top-k error has become a popular metric for large-scale classification benchmarks due to the inevitable semantic ambiguity among classes. Existing literature on top-k optimization generally focuses on the optimization method of the top-k objective, while ignoring the limitations of the metric itself. In this paper, we point out that the top-k objective lacks enough discrimination such that the induced predictions may give a totally irrelevant label a top rank. To fix this issue, we develop a novel metric named partial Area Under the top-k Curve (AUTKC). Theoretical analysis shows that AUTKC has a better discrimination ability, and its Bayes optimal score function could give a correct top-K ranking with respect to the conditional probability. This shows that AUTKC does not allow irrelevant labels to appear in the top list. Furthermore, we present an empirical surrogate risk minimization framework to optimize the proposed metric. Theoretically, we present (1) a sufficient condition for Fisher consistency of the Bayes optimal score function; (2) a generalization upper bound which is insensitive to the number of classes under a simple hyperparameter setting. Finally, the experimental results on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
title Optimizing Partial Area Under the Top-k Curve: Theory and Practice
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.01398