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Main Authors: Vituri, Shlomi, Feder, Meir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07252
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author Vituri, Shlomi
Feder, Meir
author_facet Vituri, Shlomi
Feder, Meir
contents In this paper we consider the problem of universal {\em batch} learning in a misspecification setting with log-loss. In this setting the hypothesis class is a set of models $Θ$. However, the data is generated by an unknown distribution that may not belong to this set but comes from a larger set of models $Φ\supset Θ$. Given a training sample, a universal learner is requested to predict a probability distribution for the next outcome and a log-loss is incurred. The universal learner performance is measured by the regret relative to the best hypothesis matching the data, chosen from $Θ$. Utilizing the minimax theorem and information theoretical tools, we derive the optimal universal learner, a mixture over the set of the data generating distributions, and get a closed form expression for the min-max regret. We show that this regret can be considered as a constrained version of the conditional capacity between the data and its generating distributions set. We present tight bounds for this min-max regret, implying that the complexity of the problem is dominated by the richness of the hypotheses models $Θ$ and not by the data generating distributions set $Φ$. We develop an extension to the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm for numerical evaluation of the regret and its capacity achieving prior distribution. We demonstrate our results for the case where the observations come from a $K$-parameters multinomial distributions while the hypothesis class $Θ$ is only a subset of this family of distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_07252
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Universal Batch Learning Under The Misspecification Setting
Vituri, Shlomi
Feder, Meir
Machine Learning
Information Theory
In this paper we consider the problem of universal {\em batch} learning in a misspecification setting with log-loss. In this setting the hypothesis class is a set of models $Θ$. However, the data is generated by an unknown distribution that may not belong to this set but comes from a larger set of models $Φ\supset Θ$. Given a training sample, a universal learner is requested to predict a probability distribution for the next outcome and a log-loss is incurred. The universal learner performance is measured by the regret relative to the best hypothesis matching the data, chosen from $Θ$. Utilizing the minimax theorem and information theoretical tools, we derive the optimal universal learner, a mixture over the set of the data generating distributions, and get a closed form expression for the min-max regret. We show that this regret can be considered as a constrained version of the conditional capacity between the data and its generating distributions set. We present tight bounds for this min-max regret, implying that the complexity of the problem is dominated by the richness of the hypotheses models $Θ$ and not by the data generating distributions set $Φ$. We develop an extension to the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm for numerical evaluation of the regret and its capacity achieving prior distribution. We demonstrate our results for the case where the observations come from a $K$-parameters multinomial distributions while the hypothesis class $Θ$ is only a subset of this family of distributions.
title Universal Batch Learning Under The Misspecification Setting
topic Machine Learning
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07252