We provide novel theoretical insights on structured prediction in the context of efficient convex surrogate loss minimization with consistency guarantees. For any task loss, we construct a convex surrogate that can be optimized via stochastic gradient descent and we prove tight bounds on the so-called "calibration function" relating the excess surrogate risk to the actual risk. In contrast to prior related work, we carefully monitor the effect of the exponential number of classes in the learning guarantees as well as on the optimization complexity. As an interesting consequence, we formalize the intuition that some task losses make learning harder than others, and that the classical 0-1 loss is ill-suited for general structured prediction.
SSVM is one of the most used convex surrogates for tasks with structured outputs, thus, its consistency has been a question of great interest. It is known that Crammer-Singer multi-class SVM , which SSVM is built on, is not consistent for 0-1 loss unless there is a majority class with probability at least @math . However, it is consistent for the abstain'' and ordinal losses in the case of @math classes @cite_5 . Structured ramp loss and probit surrogates are closely related to SSVM and are consistent , but not convex.
@cite_5
1496025956 1863660263 1982032418 2032708784
Transductive SVM (TSVM) is a well known semi-supervised large margin learning method for binary text classification. In this paper we extend this method to multi-class and hierarchical classification problems. We point out that the determination of labels of unlabeled examples with fixed classifier weights is a linear programming problem. We devise an efficient technique for solving it. The method is applicable to general loss functions. We demonstrate the value of the new method using large margin loss on a number of multiclass and hierarchical classification datasets. For maxent loss we show empirically that our method is better than expectation regularization constraint and posterior regularization methods, and competitive with the version of entropy regularization method which uses label constraints. Learning with non-modular losses is an important problem when sets of predictions are made simultaneously. The main tools for constructing convex surrogate loss functions for set prediction are margin rescaling and slack rescaling. In this work, we show that these strategies lead to tight convex surrogates iff the underlying loss function is increasing in the number of incorrect predictions. However, gradient or cutting-plane computation for these functions is NP-hard for nonsupermodular loss functions. We propose instead a novel convex surrogate loss function for submodular losses, the Lovasz hinge, which leads to O(p log p) complexity with O(p) oracle accesses to the loss function to compute a gradient or cutting-plane. As a result, we have developed the first tractable convex surrogates in the literature for submodular losses. We demonstrate the utility of this novel convex surrogate through a real world image labeling task. Many of the classification algorithms developed in the machine learning literature, including the support vector machine and boosting, can be viewed as minimum contrast methods that minimize a convex surrogate of the 0–1 loss function. The convexity makes these algorithms computationally efficient. The use of a surrogate, however, has statistical consequences that must be balanced against the computational virtues of convexity. To study these issues, we provide a general quantitative relationship between the risk as assessed using the 0–1 loss and the risk as assessed using any nonnegative surrogate loss function. We show that this relationship gives nontrivial upper bounds on excess risk under the weakest possible condition on the loss function—that it satisfies a pointwise form of Fisher consistency for classification. The relationship is based on a simple variational transformation of the loss function that is easy to compute in many applications. We also present a refined version of this result in the... In the interest of deriving classifiers that are robust to outlier observations, we present integer programming formulations of Vapnik's support vector machine (SVM) with the ramp loss and hard margin loss. The ramp loss allows a maximum error of 2 for each training observation, while the hard margin loss calculates error by counting the number of training observations that are in the margin or misclassified outside of the margin. SVM with these loss functions is shown to be a consistent estimator when used with certain kernel functions. In computational studies with simulated and real-world data, SVM with the robust loss functions ignores outlier observations effectively, providing an advantage over SVM with the traditional hinge loss when using the linear kernel. Despite the fact that training SVM with the robust loss functions requires the solution of a quadratic mixed-integer program (QMIP) and is NP-hard, while traditional SVM requires only the solution of a continuous quadratic program (QP), we are able to find good solutions and prove optimality for instances with up to 500 observations. Solution methods are presented for the new formulations that improve computational performance over industry-standard integer programming solvers alone.