Optimal bounds for aggregation of affine estimators

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Abstract: We study the problem of aggregation of estimators when the estimators are not independent of the data used for aggregation and no sample splitting is allowed. If the estimators are deterministic vectors, it is well known that the minimax rate of aggregation is of order log(M), where M is the number of estimators to aggregate. It is proved that for affine estimators, the minimax rate of aggregation is unchanged: it is possible to handle the linear dependence between the affine estimators and the data used for aggregation at no extra cost. The minimax rate is not impacted either by the variance of the affine estimators, or any other measure of their statistical complexity. The minimax rate is attained with a penalized procedure over the convex hull of the estimators, for a penalty that is inspired from the Q-aggregation procedure. The results follow from the interplay between the penalty, strong convexity and concentration.


The author investigates the problem of aggregating a collection of affine estimators in a heteroscedastic regression model with Gaussian additive noise. The estimators are not independent of the data used for the aggregation. This leads to the question whether well-known minimax rates which hold for deterministic estimators remain valid or whether the variances of the estimators and their dependence increase the price to pay for aggregation because of statistical complexity. It is proven that for affine estimators, the minimax rate of aggregation is unchanged. The author defines a penalized procedure over the complex hull of the estimators and shows that it achieves sharp oracle inequalities in deviation for aggregation of affine estimators. The penalty term is inspired from the \(Q\)-aggregation procedure. Moreover, it is shown that the penalized aggregate is robust to non-Gaussian noise and to a certain variance misspecification.



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