Leave-One-Out Prediction for General Hypothesis Classes
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 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 , where is the VC dimension. For finite hypothesis and density classes under bounded or log loss, it scales as and , respectively. For logistic regression with bounded covariates and parameters, a volumetric argument based on the empirical covariance matrix yields complexity scaling as up to problem-dependent factors.
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}
}