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research article

Regularization via Mass Transportation

Shafieezadeh Abadeh, Soroosh  
•
Kuhn, Daniel  
•
Mohajerin Esfahani, Peyman  
2019
Journal of Machine Learning Research

The goal of regression and classification methods in supervised learning is to minimize the empirical risk, that is, the expectation of some loss function quantifying the prediction error under the empirical distribution. When facing scarce training data, overfitting is typically mitigated by adding regularization terms to the objective that penalize hypothesis complexity. In this paper we introduce new regularization techniques using ideas from distributionally robust optimization, and we give new probabilistic interpretations to existing techniques. Specifically, we propose to minimize the worst-case expected loss, where the worst case is taken over the ball of all (continuous or discrete) distributions that have a bounded transportation distance from the (discrete) empirical distribution. By choosing the radius of this ball judiciously, we can guarantee that the worst-case expected loss provides an upper confidence bound on the loss on test data, thus offering new generalization bounds. We prove that the resulting regularized learning problems are tractable and can be tractably kernelized for many popular loss functions. We validate our theoretical out-of-sample guarantees through simulated and empirical experiments.

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Type
research article
Web of Science ID

WOS:000476622400001

Author(s)
Shafieezadeh Abadeh, Soroosh  
Kuhn, Daniel  
Mohajerin Esfahani, Peyman  
Date Issued

2019

Published in
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Volume

20

Issue

103

Start page

1

End page

68

Subjects

Distributionally robust optimization

•

Optimal transport

•

Wasserstein distance

•

Robust optimization

•

Regularization

URL

Fulltext

http://jmlr.org/papers/v20/17-633.html

Available from Optimization Online

http://www.optimization-online.org/DB_HTML/2017/10/6298.html
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
RAO  
Available on Infoscience
October 27, 2017
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/141670
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