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Main Authors: Wong-Toi, Eliot, Boyd, Alex, Fortuin, Vincent, Mandt, Stephan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16717
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author Wong-Toi, Eliot
Boyd, Alex
Fortuin, Vincent
Mandt, Stephan
author_facet Wong-Toi, Eliot
Boyd, Alex
Fortuin, Vincent
Mandt, Stephan
contents Deep, overparameterized regression models are notorious for their tendency to overfit. This problem is exacerbated in heteroskedastic models, which predict both mean and residual noise for each data point. At one extreme, these models fit all training data perfectly, eliminating residual noise entirely; at the other, they overfit the residual noise while predicting a constant, uninformative mean. We observe a lack of middle ground, suggesting a phase transition dependent on model regularization strength. Empirical verification supports this conjecture by fitting numerous models with varying mean and variance regularization. To explain the transition, we develop a theoretical framework based on a statistical field theory, yielding qualitative agreement with experiments. As a practical consequence, our analysis simplifies hyperparameter tuning from a two-dimensional to a one-dimensional search, substantially reducing the computational burden. Experiments on diverse datasets, including UCI datasets and the large-scale ClimSim climate dataset, demonstrate significantly improved performance in various calibration tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_16717
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Pathologies of Deep Heteroskedastic Regression
Wong-Toi, Eliot
Boyd, Alex
Fortuin, Vincent
Mandt, Stephan
Machine Learning
Deep, overparameterized regression models are notorious for their tendency to overfit. This problem is exacerbated in heteroskedastic models, which predict both mean and residual noise for each data point. At one extreme, these models fit all training data perfectly, eliminating residual noise entirely; at the other, they overfit the residual noise while predicting a constant, uninformative mean. We observe a lack of middle ground, suggesting a phase transition dependent on model regularization strength. Empirical verification supports this conjecture by fitting numerous models with varying mean and variance regularization. To explain the transition, we develop a theoretical framework based on a statistical field theory, yielding qualitative agreement with experiments. As a practical consequence, our analysis simplifies hyperparameter tuning from a two-dimensional to a one-dimensional search, substantially reducing the computational burden. Experiments on diverse datasets, including UCI datasets and the large-scale ClimSim climate dataset, demonstrate significantly improved performance in various calibration tasks.
title Understanding Pathologies of Deep Heteroskedastic Regression
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16717