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In this paper, we improve the PAC-Bayesian error bound for linear regression derived in Germain et al. [10]. The improvements are twofold. First, the proposed error bound is tighter, and converges to the generalization loss with a well-chosen temperature parameter. Second, the error bound also holds for training data that are not independently sampled. In particular, the error bound applies to certain time series generated by well-known classes of dynamical models, such as ARX models.
Existing guarantees in terms of rigorous upper bounds on the generalization error for the original random forest algorithm, one of the most frequently used machine learning methods, are unsatisfying. We discuss and evaluate various PAC-Bayesian approaches to derive such bounds. The bounds do not require additional hold-out data, because the out-of-bag samples from the bagging in the training process can be exploited. A random forest predicts by taking a majority vote of an ensemble of decision trees. The first approach is to bound the error of the vote by twice the error of the corresponding Gibbs classifier (classifying with a single member of the ensemble selected at random). However, this approach does not take into account the effect of averaging out of errors of individual classifiers when taking the majority vote. This effect provides a significant boost in performance when the errors are independent or negatively correlated, but when the correlations are strong the advantage from taking the majority vote is small. The second approach based on PAC-Bayesian C-bounds takes dependencies between ensemble members into account, but it requires estimating correlations between the errors of the individual classifiers. When the correlations are high or the estimation is poor, the bounds degrade. In our experiments, we compute generalization bounds for random forests on various benchmark data sets. Because the individual decision trees already perform well, their predictions are highly correlated and the C-bounds do not lead to satisfactory results. For the same reason, the bounds based on the analysis of Gibbs classifiers are typically superior and often reasonably tight. Bounds based on a validation set coming at the cost of a smaller training set gave better performance guarantees, but worse performance in most experiments.
We present a novel analysis of the expected risk of weighted majority vote in multiclass classification. The analysis takes correlation of predictions by ensemble members into account and provides a bound that is amenable to efficient minimization, which yields improved weighting for the majority vote. We also provide a specialized version of our bound for binary classification, which allows to exploit additional unlabeled data for tighter risk estimation. In experiments, we apply the bound to improve weighting of trees in random forests and show that, in contrast to the commonly used first order bound, minimization of the new bound typically does not lead to degradation of the test error of the ensemble.
Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) is a family of coherent risk measures which generalize the traditional mathematical expectation. Widely used in mathematical finance, it is garnering increasing interest in machine learning, e.g., as an alternate approach to regularization, and as a means for ensuring fairness. This paper presents a generalization bound for learning algorithms that minimize the CVaR of the empirical loss. The bound is of PAC-Bayesian type and is guaranteed to be small when the empirical CVaR is small. We achieve this by reducing the problem of estimating CVaR to that of merely estimating an expectation. This then enables us, as a by-product, to obtain concentration inequalities for CVaR even when the random variable in question is unbounded.
One of the challenges in model-based control of stochastic dynamical systems is that the state transition dynamics are involved, and it is not easy or efficient to make good-quality predictions of the states. Moreover, there are not many representational models for the majority of autonomous systems, as it is not easy to build a compact model that captures the entire dynamical subtleties and uncertainties. In this work, we present a hierarchical Bayesian linear regression model with local features to learn the dynamics of a micro-robotic system as well as two simpler examples, consisting of a stochastic mass-spring damper and a stochastic double inverted pendulum on a cart. The model is hierarchical since we assume non-stationary priors for the model parameters. These non-stationary priors make the model more flexible by imposing priors on the priors of the model. To solve the maximum likelihood (ML) problem for this hierarchical model, we use the variational expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, and enhance the procedure by introducing hidden target variables. The algorithm yields parsimonious model structures, and consistently provides fast and accurate predictions for all our examples involving large training and test sets. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the method in learning stochastic dynamics, which makes it suitable for future use in a paradigm, such as model-based reinforcement learning, to compute optimal control policies in real time.
By leveraging experience from previous tasks, meta-learning algorithms can achieve effective fast adaptation ability when encountering new tasks. However it is unclear how the generalization property applies to new tasks. Probably approximately correct (PAC) Bayes bound theory provides a theoretical framework to analyze the generalization performance for meta-learning. We derive three novel generalisation error bounds for meta-learning based on PAC-Bayes relative entropy bound. Furthermore, using the empirical risk minimization (ERM) method, a PAC-Bayes bound for meta-learning with data-dependent prior is developed. Experiments illustrate that the proposed three PAC-Bayes bounds for meta-learning guarantee a competitive generalization performance guarantee, and the extended PAC-Bayes bound with data-dependent prior can achieve rapid convergence ability.