Consistency for Large Neural Networks: Regression and Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhan, Haoran, Xia, Yingcun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhan, Haoran
Xia, Yingcun
author_facet Zhan, Haoran
Xia, Yingcun
contents Although overparameterized models have achieved remarkable practical success, their theoretical properties, particularly their generalization behavior, remain incompletely understood. The well known double descents phenomenon suggests that the test error curve of neural networks decreases monotonically as model size grows and eventually converges to a non-zero constant. This work aims to explain the theoretical mechanism underlying this tail behavior and study the statistical consistency of deep overparameterized neural networks in many different learning tasks including regression and classification. Firstly, we prove that as the number of parameters increases, the approximation error decreases monotonically, while explicit or implicit regularization (e.g., weight decay) keeps the generalization error existing but bounded. Consequently, the overall error curve eventually converges to a constant determined by the bounded generalization error and the optimization error. Secondly, we prove that deep overparameterized neural networks are statistical consistency across multiple learning tasks if regularization technique is used. Our theoretical findings coincide with numerical experiments and provide a perspective for understanding the generalization behavior of overparameterized neural networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14123
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Consistency for Large Neural Networks: Regression and Classification
Zhan, Haoran
Xia, Yingcun
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Although overparameterized models have achieved remarkable practical success, their theoretical properties, particularly their generalization behavior, remain incompletely understood. The well known double descents phenomenon suggests that the test error curve of neural networks decreases monotonically as model size grows and eventually converges to a non-zero constant. This work aims to explain the theoretical mechanism underlying this tail behavior and study the statistical consistency of deep overparameterized neural networks in many different learning tasks including regression and classification. Firstly, we prove that as the number of parameters increases, the approximation error decreases monotonically, while explicit or implicit regularization (e.g., weight decay) keeps the generalization error existing but bounded. Consequently, the overall error curve eventually converges to a constant determined by the bounded generalization error and the optimization error. Secondly, we prove that deep overparameterized neural networks are statistical consistency across multiple learning tasks if regularization technique is used. Our theoretical findings coincide with numerical experiments and provide a perspective for understanding the generalization behavior of overparameterized neural networks.
title Consistency for Large Neural Networks: Regression and Classification
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14123