Analyzing Cost-Sensitive Surrogate Losses via $\mathcal{H}$-calibration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shah, Sanket, Tambe, Milind, Finocchiaro, Jessie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shah, Sanket
Tambe, Milind
Finocchiaro, Jessie
author_facet Shah, Sanket
Tambe, Milind
Finocchiaro, Jessie
contents This paper aims to understand whether machine learning models should be trained using cost-sensitive surrogates or cost-agnostic ones (e.g., cross-entropy). Analyzing this question through the lens of $\mathcal{H}$-calibration, we find that cost-sensitive surrogates can strictly outperform their cost-agnostic counterparts when learning small models under common distributional assumptions. Since these distributional assumptions are hard to verify in practice, we also show that cost-sensitive surrogates consistently outperform cost-agnostic surrogates on classification datasets from the UCI repository. Together, these make a strong case for using cost-sensitive surrogates in practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19522
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analyzing Cost-Sensitive Surrogate Losses via $\mathcal{H}$-calibration
Shah, Sanket
Tambe, Milind
Finocchiaro, Jessie
Machine Learning
This paper aims to understand whether machine learning models should be trained using cost-sensitive surrogates or cost-agnostic ones (e.g., cross-entropy). Analyzing this question through the lens of $\mathcal{H}$-calibration, we find that cost-sensitive surrogates can strictly outperform their cost-agnostic counterparts when learning small models under common distributional assumptions. Since these distributional assumptions are hard to verify in practice, we also show that cost-sensitive surrogates consistently outperform cost-agnostic surrogates on classification datasets from the UCI repository. Together, these make a strong case for using cost-sensitive surrogates in practice.
title Analyzing Cost-Sensitive Surrogate Losses via $\mathcal{H}$-calibration
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19522