Information-theoretic perspectives on learning algorithms

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• Varun Jog (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• Thursday 22 February 2018, 11:00-12:00
• Seminar Room 2, Newton Institute.

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STS - Statistical scalability

In statistical learning theory, generalization error is used to quantify the degree to which a supervised machine learning algorithm may overfit to training data. We overview some recent work [Xu and Raginsky (2017)] that bounds generalization error of empirical risk minimization based on the mutual information I(S;W) between the algorithm input S and the algorithm output W. We leverage these results to derive generalization error bounds for a broad class of iterative algorithms that are characterized by bounded, noisy updates with Markovian structure, such as stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD). We describe certain shortcomings of mutual information-based bounds, and propose alternate bounds that employ the Wasserstein metric from optimal transport theory. We compare the Wasserstein metric-based bounds with the mutual information-based bounds and show that for a class of data generating distributions, the former leads to stronger bounds on the generalization error.

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

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