Robust Online Classification: From Estimation to Denoising

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wu, Changlong, Grama, Ananth, Szpankowski, Wojciech
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916411058683904
author Wu, Changlong
Grama, Ananth
Szpankowski, Wojciech
author_facet Wu, Changlong
Grama, Ananth
Szpankowski, Wojciech
contents We study online classification of features into labels with general hypothesis classes. In our setting, true labels are determined by some function within the hypothesis class but are corrupted by unknown stochastic noise, and the features are generated adversarially. Predictions are made using observed noisy labels and noiseless features, while the performance is measured via minimax risk when comparing against true labels. The noise mechanism is modeled via a general noise kernel that specifies, for any individual data point, a set of distributions from which the actual noisy label distribution is chosen. We show that minimax risk is tightly characterized (up to a logarithmic factor of the hypothesis class size) by the Hellinger gap of the noisy label distributions induced by the kernel, independent of other properties such as the means and variances of the noise. Our main technique is based on a novel reduction to an online comparison scheme of two hypotheses, along with a new conditional version of Le Cam-Birgé testing suitable for online settings. Our work provides the first comprehensive characterization for noisy online classification with guarantees with respect to the ground truth while addressing general noisy observations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_01698
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Online Classification: From Estimation to Denoising
Wu, Changlong
Grama, Ananth
Szpankowski, Wojciech
Machine Learning
We study online classification of features into labels with general hypothesis classes. In our setting, true labels are determined by some function within the hypothesis class but are corrupted by unknown stochastic noise, and the features are generated adversarially. Predictions are made using observed noisy labels and noiseless features, while the performance is measured via minimax risk when comparing against true labels. The noise mechanism is modeled via a general noise kernel that specifies, for any individual data point, a set of distributions from which the actual noisy label distribution is chosen. We show that minimax risk is tightly characterized (up to a logarithmic factor of the hypothesis class size) by the Hellinger gap of the noisy label distributions induced by the kernel, independent of other properties such as the means and variances of the noise. Our main technique is based on a novel reduction to an online comparison scheme of two hypotheses, along with a new conditional version of Le Cam-Birgé testing suitable for online settings. Our work provides the first comprehensive characterization for noisy online classification with guarantees with respect to the ground truth while addressing general noisy observations.
title Robust Online Classification: From Estimation to Denoising
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01698