Statistical Learning under Heterogeneous Distribution Shift
This work addresses robust prediction in machine learning under distribution shifts, offering theoretical insights for domain adaptation, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ERM and covariate shift frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting a target variable under heterogeneous covariate shift, where the ground-truth predictor is additive, and shows that empirical risk minimization (ERM) is more resilient to shifts in simpler features, with recovery rates having lower-order dependence on the complexity of other components.
This paper studies the prediction of a target $\mathbf{z}$ from a pair of random variables $(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y})$, where the ground-truth predictor is additive $\mathbb{E}[\mathbf{z} \mid \mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}] = f_\star(\mathbf{x}) +g_{\star}(\mathbf{y})$. We study the performance of empirical risk minimization (ERM) over functions $f+g$, $f \in F$ and $g \in G$, fit on a given training distribution, but evaluated on a test distribution which exhibits covariate shift. We show that, when the class $F$ is "simpler" than $G$ (measured, e.g., in terms of its metric entropy), our predictor is more resilient to heterogeneous covariate shifts} in which the shift in $\mathbf{x}$ is much greater than that in $\mathbf{y}$. Our analysis proceeds by demonstrating that ERM behaves qualitatively similarly to orthogonal machine learning: the rate at which ERM recovers the $f$-component of the predictor has only a lower-order dependence on the complexity of the class $G$, adjusted for partial non-indentifiability introduced by the additive structure. These results rely on a novel Hölder style inequality for the Dudley integral which may be of independent interest. Moreover, we corroborate our theoretical findings with experiments demonstrating improved resilience to shifts in "simpler" features across numerous domains.