Mix and Match: An Optimistic Tree-Search Approach for Learning Models from Mixture Distributions

TL;DR

This paper introduces ${ m Mix ext{ extsterling} ext{ extsterling}}$, an algorithm combining SGD, optimistic tree search, and model re-use to optimize mixture distributions over training datasets for improved validation performance under covariate shift.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel algorithm that integrates stochastic gradient descent with optimistic tree search and model re-use to effectively learn mixture distributions under covariate shift.

Findings

Proves simple regret guarantees for the algorithm.

Demonstrates effectiveness on two real-world datasets.

Abstract

We consider a covariate shift problem where one has access to several different training datasets for the same learning problem and a small validation set which possibly differs from all the individual training distributions. This covariate shift is caused, in part, due to unobserved features in the datasets. The objective, then, is to find the best mixture distribution over the training datasets (with only observed features) such that training a learning algorithm using this mixture has the best validation performance. Our proposed algorithm, ${\sf Mix\&Match}$, combines stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with optimistic tree search and model re-use (evolving partially trained models with samples from different mixture distributions) over the space of mixtures, for this task. We prove simple regret guarantees for our algorithm with respect to recovering the optimal mixture, given a total budget of SGD evaluations. Finally, we validate our algorithm on two real-world datasets.