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Main Authors: Ayme, Alexis, Loureiro, Bruno
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21174
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author Ayme, Alexis
Loureiro, Bruno
author_facet Ayme, Alexis
Loureiro, Bruno
contents In this work, we address the following question: What minimal structural assumptions are needed to prevent the degradation of statistical learning bounds with increasing dimensionality? We investigate this question in the classical statistical setting of signal estimation from $n$ independent linear observations $Y_i = X_i^{\top}θ+ ε_i$. Our focus is on the generalization properties of a broad family of predictors that can be expressed as linear combinations of the training labels, $f(X) = \sum_{i=1}^{n} l_{i}(X) Y_i$. This class -- commonly referred to as linear prediction rules -- encompasses a wide range of popular parametric and non-parametric estimators, including ridge regression, gradient descent, and kernel methods. Our contributions are twofold. First, we derive non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the generalization error for this class under the assumption that the Bayes predictor $θ$ lies in an ellipsoid. Second, we establish a lower bound for the subclass of rotationally invariant linear prediction rules when the Bayes predictor is fixed. Our analysis highlights two fundamental contributions to the risk: (a) a variance-like term that captures the intrinsic dimensionality of the data; (b) the noiseless error, a term that arises specifically in the high-dimensional regime. These findings shed light on the role of structural assumptions in mitigating the curse of dimensionality.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breaking the curse of dimensionality for linear rules: optimal predictors over the ellipsoid
Ayme, Alexis
Loureiro, Bruno
Machine Learning
In this work, we address the following question: What minimal structural assumptions are needed to prevent the degradation of statistical learning bounds with increasing dimensionality? We investigate this question in the classical statistical setting of signal estimation from $n$ independent linear observations $Y_i = X_i^{\top}θ+ ε_i$. Our focus is on the generalization properties of a broad family of predictors that can be expressed as linear combinations of the training labels, $f(X) = \sum_{i=1}^{n} l_{i}(X) Y_i$. This class -- commonly referred to as linear prediction rules -- encompasses a wide range of popular parametric and non-parametric estimators, including ridge regression, gradient descent, and kernel methods. Our contributions are twofold. First, we derive non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the generalization error for this class under the assumption that the Bayes predictor $θ$ lies in an ellipsoid. Second, we establish a lower bound for the subclass of rotationally invariant linear prediction rules when the Bayes predictor is fixed. Our analysis highlights two fundamental contributions to the risk: (a) a variance-like term that captures the intrinsic dimensionality of the data; (b) the noiseless error, a term that arises specifically in the high-dimensional regime. These findings shed light on the role of structural assumptions in mitigating the curse of dimensionality.
title Breaking the curse of dimensionality for linear rules: optimal predictors over the ellipsoid
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21174