Binary Excess Risk for Smooth Convex Surrogates
This addresses a theoretical problem in statistical learning for researchers, revealing a trade-off in smoothness that is incremental to existing understanding.
The paper investigates how smoothness in convex surrogate loss functions affects binary excess risk, finding that smoothness can degrade this risk despite benefits for optimization and generalization, and shows that under favorable conditions, appropriate smooth convex losses can achieve binary excess risk better than O(1/√n).
In statistical learning theory, convex surrogates of the 0-1 loss are highly preferred because of the computational and theoretical virtues that convexity brings in. This is of more importance if we consider smooth surrogates as witnessed by the fact that the smoothness is further beneficial both computationally- by attaining an {\it optimal} convergence rate for optimization, and in a statistical sense- by providing an improved {\it optimistic} rate for generalization bound. In this paper we investigate the smoothness property from the viewpoint of statistical consistency and show how it affects the binary excess risk. We show that in contrast to optimization and generalization errors that favor the choice of smooth surrogate loss, the smoothness of loss function may degrade the binary excess risk. Motivated by this negative result, we provide a unified analysis that integrates optimization error, generalization bound, and the error in translating convex excess risk into a binary excess risk when examining the impact of smoothness on the binary excess risk. We show that under favorable conditions appropriate choice of smooth convex loss will result in a binary excess risk that is better than $O(1/\sqrt{n})$.