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Controlling Multiple Errors Simultaneously with a PAC-Bayes Bound

Machine Learning 2024-12-10 v3 Machine Learning Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

Current PAC-Bayes generalisation bounds are restricted to scalar metrics of performance, such as the loss or error rate. However, one ideally wants more information-rich certificates that control the entire distribution of possible outcomes, such as the distribution of the test loss in regression, or the probabilities of different mis-classifications. We provide the first PAC-Bayes bound capable of providing such rich information by bounding the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the empirical and true probabilities of a set of MM error types, which can either be discretized loss values for regression, or the elements of the confusion matrix (or a partition thereof) for classification. We transform our bound into a differentiable training objective. Our bound is especially useful in cases where the severity of different mis-classifications may change over time; existing PAC-Bayes bounds can only bound a particular pre-decided weighting of the error types. In contrast our bound implicitly controls all uncountably many weightings simultaneously.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.05560,
  title  = {Controlling Multiple Errors Simultaneously with a PAC-Bayes Bound},
  author = {Reuben Adams and John Shawe-Taylor and Benjamin Guedj},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.05560},
  year   = {2024}
}

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28 pages