A Sample Complexity Measure with Applications to Learning Optimal Auctions
This work provides a theoretical tool for analyzing sample complexity in auction design, which is incremental but useful for researchers in algorithmic game theory and machine learning.
The paper introduces a new sample complexity measure called split-sample growth rate to bound generalization error, and applies it to simplify sample complexity analysis for optimal auction design.
We introduce a new sample complexity measure, which we refer to as split-sample growth rate. For any hypothesis $H$ and for any sample $S$ of size $m$, the split-sample growth rate $\hatτ_H(m)$ counts how many different hypotheses can empirical risk minimization output on any sub-sample of $S$ of size $m/2$. We show that the expected generalization error is upper bounded by $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{\log(\hatτ_H(2m))}{m}}\right)$. Our result is enabled by a strengthening of the Rademacher complexity analysis of the expected generalization error. We show that this sample complexity measure, greatly simplifies the analysis of the sample complexity of optimal auction design, for many auction classes studied in the literature. Their sample complexity can be derived solely by noticing that in these auction classes, ERM on any sample or sub-sample will pick parameters that are equal to one of the points in the sample.