Interpolating Predictors in High-Dimensional Factor Regression
It addresses the problem of understanding when interpolating predictors work well in high-dimensional settings for statisticians and machine learning researchers, providing theoretical insights but being incremental in nature.
This paper analyzes the risk of minimum-norm interpolating predictors in high-dimensional regression, showing that it performs poorly when the covariance matrix's effective rank exceeds the sample size, but surprisingly, under a factor regression model with lower effective rank, it achieves near-optimal risk and can outperform LASSO-based predictors.
This work studies finite-sample properties of the risk of the minimum-norm interpolating predictor in high-dimensional regression models. If the effective rank of the covariance matrix $Σ$ of the $p$ regression features is much larger than the sample size $n$, we show that the min-norm interpolating predictor is not desirable, as its risk approaches the risk of trivially predicting the response by 0. However, our detailed finite-sample analysis reveals, surprisingly, that this behavior is not present when the regression response and the features are {\it jointly} low-dimensional, following a widely used factor regression model. Within this popular model class, and when the effective rank of $Σ$ is smaller than $n$, while still allowing for $p \gg n$, both the bias and the variance terms of the excess risk can be controlled, and the risk of the minimum-norm interpolating predictor approaches optimal benchmarks. Moreover, through a detailed analysis of the bias term, we exhibit model classes under which our upper bound on the excess risk approaches zero, while the corresponding upper bound in the recent work arXiv:1906.11300 diverges. Furthermore, we show that the minimum-norm interpolating predictor analyzed under the factor regression model, despite being model-agnostic and devoid of tuning parameters, can have similar risk to predictors based on principal components regression and ridge regression, and can improve over LASSO based predictors, in the high-dimensional regime.