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Leave-One-Out Prediction for General Hypothesis Classes

Machine Learning 2026-03-03 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Leave-one-out (LOO) prediction provides a principled, data-dependent measure of generalization, yet guarantees in fully transductive settings remain poorly understood beyond specialized models. We introduce Median of Level-Set Aggregation (MLSA), a general aggregation procedure based on empirical-risk level sets around the ERM. For arbitrary fixed datasets and losses satisfying a mild monotonicity condition, we establish a multiplicative oracle inequality for the LOO error of the form LOOS(h^)    C1nminhHLS(h)  +  Comp(S,H,)n,C>1. LOO_S(\hat{h}) \;\le\; C \cdot \frac{1}{n} \min_{h\in H} L_S(h) \;+\; \frac{Comp(S,H,\ell)}{n}, \qquad C>1. The analysis is based on a local level-set growth condition controlling how the set of near-optimal empirical-risk minimizers expands as the tolerance increases. We verify this condition in several canonical settings. For classification with VC classes under the 0-1 loss, the resulting complexity scales as O(dlogn)O(d \log n), where dd is the VC dimension. For finite hypothesis and density classes under bounded or log loss, it scales as O(logH)O(\log |H|) and O(logP)O(\log |P|), respectively. For logistic regression with bounded covariates and parameters, a volumetric argument based on the empirical covariance matrix yields complexity scaling as O(dlogn)O(d \log n) up to problem-dependent factors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.02043,
  title  = {Leave-One-Out Prediction for General Hypothesis Classes},
  author = {Jian Qian and Jiachen Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02043},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:59:30.508Z