Ting Hu

Yunwen Lei, Ting Hu, Guiying Li et al.

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing theoretical results for SGD applied to nonconvex objective functions are far from mature. For example, existing results require to impose a nontrivial assumption on the uniform boundedness of gradients for all iterates encountered in the learning process, which is hard to verify in practical implementations. In this paper, we establish a rigorous theoretical foundation for SGD in nonconvex learning by showing that this boundedness assumption can be removed without affecting convergence rates. In particular, we establish sufficient conditions for almost sure convergence as well as optimal convergence rates for SGD applied to both general nonconvex objective functions and gradient-dominated objective functions. A linear convergence is further derived in the case with zero variances.

Jun Fan, Ting Hu, Qiang Wu et al.

In this paper we study the consistency of an empirical minimum error entropy (MEE) algorithm in a regression setting. We introduce two types of consistency. The error entropy consistency, which requires the error entropy of the learned function to approximate the minimum error entropy, is shown to be always true if the bandwidth parameter tends to 0 at an appropriate rate. The regression consistency, which requires the learned function to approximate the regression function, however, is a complicated issue. We prove that the error entropy consistency implies the regression consistency for homoskedastic models where the noise is independent of the input variable. But for heteroskedastic models, a counterexample is used to show that the two types of consistency do not coincide. A surprising result is that the regression consistency is always true, provided that the bandwidth parameter tends to infinity at an appropriate rate. Regression consistency of two classes of special models is shown to hold with fixed bandwidth parameter, which further illustrates the complexity of regression consistency of MEE. Fourier transform plays crucial roles in our analysis.

Ting Hu, Jun Fan, Qiang Wu et al.

We consider the minimum error entropy (MEE) criterion and an empirical risk minimization learning algorithm in a regression setting. A learning theory approach is presented for this MEE algorithm and explicit error bounds are provided in terms of the approximation ability and capacity of the involved hypothesis space when the MEE scaling parameter is large. Novel asymptotic analysis is conducted for the generalization error associated with Renyi's entropy and a Parzen window function, to overcome technical difficulties arisen from the essential differences between the classical least squares problems and the MEE setting. A semi-norm and the involved symmetrized least squares error are introduced, which is related to some ranking algorithms.