Bagging is an Optimal PAC Learner
Speaker
Kasper Green Larsen, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Aarhus University
Aarhus University
Host
Mohsen Ghaffari
CSAIL MIT
Abstract:
Determining the optimal sample complexity of PAC learning in the realizable setting was a central open problem in learning theory for decades. Finally, the seminal work by Hanneke (2016) gave an algorithm with a provably optimal sample complexity. His algorithm is based on a careful and structured sub-sampling of the training data and then returning a majority vote among hypotheses trained on each of the sub-samples. While being a very exciting theoretical result, it has not had much impact in practice, in part due to inefficiency, since it constructs a polynomial number of sub-samples of the training data, each of linear size.
In this talk, we prove the surprising result that the practical and classic heuristic Bagging (a.k.a. bootstrap aggregation), due to Breiman (1996), is in fact also an optimal PAC learner. Bagging pre-dates Hanneke's algorithm by twenty years and is taught in most undergraduate machine learning courses. Moreover, we show that it only requires a logarithmic number of sub-samples to reach optimality.
This work was published at COLT’23 and received the Best Paper Award.
Determining the optimal sample complexity of PAC learning in the realizable setting was a central open problem in learning theory for decades. Finally, the seminal work by Hanneke (2016) gave an algorithm with a provably optimal sample complexity. His algorithm is based on a careful and structured sub-sampling of the training data and then returning a majority vote among hypotheses trained on each of the sub-samples. While being a very exciting theoretical result, it has not had much impact in practice, in part due to inefficiency, since it constructs a polynomial number of sub-samples of the training data, each of linear size.
In this talk, we prove the surprising result that the practical and classic heuristic Bagging (a.k.a. bootstrap aggregation), due to Breiman (1996), is in fact also an optimal PAC learner. Bagging pre-dates Hanneke's algorithm by twenty years and is taught in most undergraduate machine learning courses. Moreover, we show that it only requires a logarithmic number of sub-samples to reach optimality.
This work was published at COLT’23 and received the Best Paper Award.