Learning From An Optimization Viewpoint

TL;DR

This dissertation explores the connection between optimization and learning, providing new theoretical insights into learnability, stability, and optimal algorithms for both statistical and online convex learning problems.

Contribution

It characterizes learnability in general settings using stability, develops online analogs of classical tools, and establishes near-optimal mirror descent algorithms for convex learning and optimization.

Findings

Stability fully characterizes statistical learnability beyond uniform convergence.

Developed online Rademacher complexity and covering numbers for learnability analysis.

Mirror descent is near optimal for a broad class of convex learning problems.

Abstract

In this dissertation we study statistical and online learning problems from an optimization viewpoint.The dissertation is divided into two parts : I. We first consider the question of learnability for statistical learning problems in the general learning setting. The question of learnability is well studied and fully characterized for binary classification and for real valued supervised learning problems using the theory of uniform convergence. However we show that for the general learning setting uniform convergence theory fails to characterize learnability. To fill this void we use stability of learning algorithms to fully characterize statistical learnability in the general setting. Next we consider the problem of online learning. Unlike the statistical learning framework there is a dearth of generic tools that can be used to establish learnability and rates for online learning problems in general. We provide online analogs to classical tools from statistical learning theory like Rademacher complexity, covering numbers, etc. We further use these tools to fully characterize learnability for online supervised learning problems. II. In the second part, for general classes of convex learning problems, we provide appropriate mirror descent (MD) updates for online and statistical learning of these problems. Further, we show that the the MD is near optimal for online convex learning and for most cases, is also near optimal for statistical convex learning. We next consider the problem of convex optimization and show that oracle complexity can be lower bounded by the so called fat-shattering dimension of the associated linear class. Thus we establish a strong connection between offline convex optimization problems and statistical learning problems. We also show that for a large class of high dimensional optimization problems, MD is in fact near optimal even for convex optimization.