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In this paper, we study the problem of early stopping for iterative learning algorithms in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) in the nonparametric regression framework. In particular, we work with the gradient descent and (iterative) kernel ridge regression algorithms. We present a data-driven rule to perform early stopping without a validation set that is based on the so-called minimum discrepancy principle. This method enjoys only one assumption on the regression function: it belongs to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The proposed rule is proved to be minimax-optimal over different types of kernel spaces, including finite-rank and Sobolev smoothness classes. The proof is derived from the fixed-point analysis of the localized Rademacher complexities, which is a standard technique for obtaining optimal rates in the nonparametric regression literature. In addition to that, we present simulation results on artificial datasets that show the comparable performance of the designed rule with respect to other stopping rules such as the one determined by V-fold cross-validation.
We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an initial distribution by a sequence of optimization updates. By tracking the change in entropy over this sequence of transformations during optimization, we form a scalable, unbiased estimate of the variational lower bound on the log marginal likelihood. We can use this bound to optimize hyperparameters instead of using cross-validation. This Bayesian interpretation of SGD suggests improved, overfitting-resistant optimization procedures, and gives a theoretical foundation for popular tricks such as early stopping and ensembling. We investigate the properties of this marginal likelihood estimator on neural network models.
We show that minimum-norm interpolation in the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space corresponding to the Laplace kernel is not consistent if input dimension is constant. The lower bound holds for any choice of kernel bandwidth, even if selected based on data. The result supports the empirical observation that minimum-norm interpolation (that is, exact fit to training data) in RKHS generalizes well for some high-dimensional datasets, but not for low-dimensional ones.
This paper studies binary logistic regression for rare events data, or imbalanced data, where the number of events (observations in one class, often called cases) is significantly smaller than the number of nonevents (observations in the other class, often called controls). We first derive the asymptotic distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the unknown parameter, which shows that the asymptotic variance convergences to zero in a rate of the inverse of the number of the events instead of the inverse of the full data sample size. This indicates that the available information in rare events data is at the scale of the number of events instead of the full data sample size. Furthermore, we prove that under-sampling a small proportion of the nonevents, the resulting under-sampled estimator may have identical asymptotic distribution to the full data MLE. This demonstrates the advantage of under-sampling nonevents for rare events data, because this procedure may significantly reduce the computation and/or data collection costs. Another common practice in analyzing rare events data is to over-sample (replicate) the events, which has a higher computational cost. We show that this procedure may even result in efficiency loss in terms of parameter estimation.
In this paper, we study the implicit bias of gradient descent for sparse regression. We extend results on regression with quadratic parametrization, which amounts to depth-2 diagonal linear networks, to more general depth-N networks, under more realistic settings of noise and correlated designs. We show that early stopping is crucial for gradient descent to converge to a sparse model, a phenomenon that we call implicit sparse regularization. This result is in sharp contrast to known results for noiseless and uncorrelated-design cases. We characterize the impact of depth and early stopping and show that for a general depth parameter N, gradient descent with early stopping achieves minimax optimal sparse recovery with sufficiently small initialization and step size. In particular, we show that increasing depth enlarges the scale of working initialization and the early-stopping window, which leads to more stable gradient paths for sparse recovery.
Systems of interacting particles or agents have wide applications in many disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Economics. These systems are governed by interaction laws, which are often unknown: estimating them from observation data is a fundamental task that can provide meaningful insights and accurate predictions of the behaviour of the agents. In this paper, we consider the inverse problem of learning interaction laws given data from multiple trajectories, in a nonparametric fashion, when the interaction kernels depend on pairwise distances. We establish a condition for learnability of interaction kernels, and construct estimators that are guaranteed to converge in a suitable $L^2$ space, at the optimal min-max rate for 1-dimensional nonparametric regression. We propose an efficient learning algorithm based on least squares, which can be implemented in parallel for multiple trajectories and is therefore well-suited for the high dimensional, big data regime. Numerical simulations on a variety examples, including opinion dynamics, predator-swarm dynamics and heterogeneous particle dynamics, suggest that the learnability condition is satisfied in models used in practice, and the rate of convergence of our estimator is consistent with the theory. These simulations also suggest that our estimators are robust to noise in the observations, and produce accurate predictions of dynamics in relative large time intervals, even when they are learned from data collected in short time intervals.