El Mehdi Haress

Matthew J. Holland, El Mehdi Haress

In this work, we consider the setting of learning problems under a wide class of spectral risk (or "L-risk") functions, where a Lipschitz-continuous spectral density is used to flexibly assign weight to extreme loss values. We obtain excess risk guarantees for a derivative-free learning procedure under unbounded heavy-tailed loss distributions, and propose a computationally efficient implementation which empirically outperforms traditional risk minimizers in terms of balancing spectral risk and misclassification error.

Matthew J. Holland, El Mehdi Haress

We study learning algorithms that seek to minimize the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), when all the learner knows is that the losses incurred may be heavy-tailed. We begin by studying a general-purpose estimator of CVaR for potentially heavy-tailed random variables, which is easy to implement in practice, and requires nothing more than finite variance and a distribution function that does not change too fast or slow around just the quantile of interest. With this estimator in hand, we then derive a new learning algorithm which robustly chooses among candidates produced by stochastic gradient-driven sub-processes. For this procedure we provide high-probability excess CVaR bounds, and to complement the theory we conduct empirical tests of the underlying CVaR estimator and the learning algorithm derived from it.