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Robust subgaussian estimation with VC-dimension

Machine Learning 2020-07-09 v3 Machine Learning Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

Median-of-means (MOM) based procedures provide non-asymptotic and strong deviation bounds even when data are heavy-tailed and/or corrupted. This work proposes a new general way to bound the excess risk for MOM estimators. The core technique is the use of VC-dimension (instead of Rademacher complexity) to measure the statistical complexity. In particular, this allows to give the first robust estimators for sparse estimation which achieves the so-called subgaussian rate only assuming a finite second moment for the uncorrupted data. By comparison, previous works using Rademacher complexities required a number of finite moments that grows logarithmically with the dimension. With this technique, we derive new robust sugaussian bounds for mean estimation in any norm. We also derive a new robust estimator for covariance estimation that is the first to achieve subgaussian bounds without L4L2L_4-L_2 norm equivalence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.11734,
  title  = {Robust subgaussian estimation with VC-dimension},
  author = {Jules Depersin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.11734},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:04:37.316Z