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Local Rademacher complexities. (English) Zbl 1083.62034
From the paper: Estimating the performance of statistical procedures is useful for providing a better understanding of the factors that influence their behavior, as well as for suggesting ways to improve them. Although asymptotic analysis is a crucial first step toward understanding the behavior, finite sample error bounds are of more value as they allow the design of model selection (or parameter tuning) procedures. These error bounds typically have the following form: with high probability, the error of the estimator (typically a function in a certain class) is bounded by an empirical estimate of error plus a penalty term depending on the complexity of the class of functions that can be chosen by the algorithm. The differences between the true and empirical errors of functions in that class can be viewed as an empirical process. Many tools have been developed for understanding the behavior of such objects, and especially for evaluating their suprema – which can be thought of as a measure of how hard it is to estimate functions in the class at hand. The goal is thus to obtain the sharpest possible estimates on the complexity of function classes. A problem arises since the notion of complexity might depend on the (unknown) underlying probability measure according to which the data is produced. Distribution-free notions of the complexity, such as the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension or the metric entropy, typically give conservative estimates. Distribution-dependent estimates, based for example on entropy numbers in the $$L_2(P)$$ distance, where $$P$$ is the underlying distribution, are not useful when $$P$$ is unknown. Thus, it is desirable to obtain data-dependent estimates which can readily be computed from the sample.
We propose new bounds on the error of learning algorithms in terms of a data-dependent notion of complexity. The estimates we establish give optimal rates and are based on a local and empirical version of Rademacher averages, in the sense that the Rademacher averages are computed from the data, on a subset of functions with small empirical error. We present some applications to classification and prediction with convex function classes, and with kernel classes in particular.

##### MSC:
 62G08 Nonparametric regression and quantile regression 68Q32 Computational learning theory 68Q25 Analysis of algorithms and problem complexity 65Y20 Complexity and performance of numerical algorithms
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