Related papers: Ranking and empirical minimization of U-statistics

Minimizing the empirical risk is a popular training strategy, but for learning tasks where the data may be noisy or heavy-tailed, one may require many observations in order to generalize well. To achieve better performance under less…

The ranking problem is to order a collection of units by some unobserved parameter, based on observations from the associated distribution. This problem arises naturally in a number of contexts, such as business, where we may want to rank…

Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…

The task of learning to pick a single preferred example out a finite set of examples, an "optimal choice problem", is a supervised machine learning problem with complex, structured input. Problems of optimal choice emerge often in various…

Classically, a mainstream approach for solving a convex-concave min-max problem is to instead solve the variational inequality problem arising from its first-order optimality conditions. Is it possible to solve min-max problems faster by…

Ranking entities such as algorithms, devices, methods, or models based on their performances, while accounting for application-specific preferences, is a challenge. To address this challenge, we establish the foundations of a universal…

Ranking and scoring are ubiquitous. We consider the setting in which an institution, called a ranker, evaluates a set of individuals based on demographic, behavioral or other characteristics. The final output is a ranking that represents…

Learning from implicit feedback is challenging because of the difficult nature of the one-class problem: we can observe only positive examples. Most conventional methods use a pairwise ranking approach and negative samplers to cope with the…

This manuscript studies statistical properties of linear classifiers obtained through minimization of an unregularized convex risk over a finite sample. Although the results are explicitly finite-dimensional, inputs may be passed through…

RRULES is presented as an improvement and optimization over RULES, a simple inductive learning algorithm for extracting IF-THEN rules from a set of training examples. RRULES optimizes the algorithm by implementing a more effective mechanism…

We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…

Ranking is a key aspect of many applications, such as information retrieval, question answering, ad placement and recommender systems. Learning to rank has the goal of estimating a ranking model automatically from training data. In…

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

A common problem in machine learning is to rank a set of n items based on pairwise comparisons. Here ranking refers to partitioning the items into sets of pre-specified sizes according to their scores, which includes identification of the…

A decision maker typically (i) incorporates training data to learn about the relative effectiveness of treatments, and (ii) chooses an implementation mechanism that implies an ``optimal'' predicted outcome distribution according to some…

We develop a family of accelerated stochastic algorithms that minimize sums of convex functions. Our algorithms improve upon the fastest running time for empirical risk minimization (ERM), and in particular linear least-squares regression,…

A ranking is an ordered sequence of items, in which an item with higher ranking score is more preferred than the items with lower ranking scores. In many information systems, rankings are widely used to represent the preferences over a set…

Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…

Policies trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) are often needlessly complex, making them difficult to analyse and interpret. In a run with $n$ time steps, a policy will make $n$ decisions on actions to take; we conjecture that only a…

Sparse reduced rank regression is an essential statistical learning method. In the contemporary literature, estimation is typically formulated as a nonconvex optimization that often yields to a local optimum in numerical computation. Yet,…