arXiv research

We study losses for binary classification and class probability estimation and extend the understanding of them from margin losses to general composite losses which are the composition of a proper loss with a link function. We characterise when margin losses can be proper composite losses, explicitly show how to determ…

Study binary choice with asymmetric loss, offering simple solutions.

Unified binary and multiclass margin-based classification methods.

Paper explores connections between loss functions and consistency in binary classification and regression.

Unhinged loss minimization fails to improve classifier accuracy for simple data.

New binary loss functions improve density ratio estimation accuracy.

Gradient descent with logistic loss can make two-layer networks interpolate binary classification data.

Paper studies multiclass classifiers from binary classifiers, proving methods and demonstrating advantages.

Study proposes a differentiable surrogate loss function for optimizing $F_β$ score in binary classification with imbalanced data.

Reduces bounded loss learning to binary classification.

Unified framework for binary responses using AUC loss and low-rank constraint.

This work examines uncertainty sampling in binary classification using equivalent loss.

In statistical learning theory, convex surrogates of the 0-1 loss are highly preferred because of the computational and theoretical virtues that convexity brings in. This is of more importance if we consider smooth surrogates as witnessed by the fact that the smoothness is further beneficial both computationally- by at…

We present $α$-loss, $α\in [1,\infty]$, a tunable loss function for binary classification that bridges log-loss ($α=1$) and $0$-$1$ loss ($α= \infty$). We prove that $α$-loss has an equivalent margin-based form and is classification-calibrated, two desirable properties for a good surrogate loss function for the ideal y…

This work analyzes two methods for combining multiple binary labels in bipartite ranking.

New test for SGD in binary classification reduces computation time.

Develops RF-GLS for binary geospatial data.

We formulate learning of a binary autoencoder as a biconvex optimization problem which learns from the pairwise correlations between encoded and decoded bits. Among all possible algorithms that use this information, ours finds the autoencoder that reconstructs its inputs with worst-case optimal loss. The optimal decode…

Binary representation is desirable for its memory efficiency, computation speed and robustness. In this paper, we propose adjustable bounded rectifiers to learn binary representations for deep neural networks. While hard constraining representations across layers to be binary makes training unreasonably difficult, we s…

The 01 loss is robust to outliers and tolerant to noisy data compared to convex loss functions. We conjecture that the 01 loss may also be more robust to adversarial attacks. To study this empirically we have developed a stochastic coordinate descent algorithm for a linear 01 loss classifier and a single hidden layer 0…

We address the problem of aggregating an ensemble of predictors with known loss bounds in a semi-supervised binary classification setting, to minimize prediction loss incurred on the unlabeled data. We find the minimax optimal predictions for a very general class of loss functions including all convex and many non-conv…

This work extends implicit bias analysis to multiclass classification using a new loss framework.

It is widely conjectured that the reason that training algorithms for neural networks are successful because all local minima lead to similar performance, for example, see (LeCun et al., 2015, Choromanska et al., 2015, Dauphin et al., 2014). Performance is typically measured in terms of two metrics: training performanc…

Introduces a differentiable approximation to the zero-one loss.

We present a comprehensive study of multilayer neural networks with binary activation, relying on the PAC-Bayesian theory. Our contributions are twofold: (i) we develop an end-to-end framework to train a binary activated deep neural network, (ii) we provide nonvacuous PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for binary activ…

Introduces Soft-SVM for binary classification bridging logistic and SVM.

We study convex empirical risk minimization for high-dimensional inference in binary models. Our first result sharply predicts the statistical performance of such estimators in the linear asymptotic regime under isotropic Gaussian features. Importantly, the predictions hold for a wide class of convex loss functions, wh…

New optimization method improves AUC for binary classification and changepoint detection.

Study on $H$-consistency bounds for machine learning surrogates.

The paper explores how different loss functions impact reinforcement learning algorithms.

Paper corrects Max-Margin loss for multi-label tasks.

Early stopping improves neural networks' performance on binary classification tasks.

Loss-calibrated EP improves Bayesian decision-making by focusing on utility-sensitive posterior approximations.

Symmetric losses improve classifier robustness from corrupted labels.

A new convex loss function optimizes set predictions with balanced size and coverage.

Study robust learning of Lipschitz functions under corrupted binary signals.

Unified framework approximates gradient descent's implicit bias in high dimensions.

Recently the deep learning techniques have achieved success in multi-label classification due to its automatic representation learning ability and the end-to-end learning framework. Existing deep neural networks in multi-label classification can be divided into two kinds: binary relevance neural network (BRNN) and thre…

The paper presents Imbalance-XGBoost, a Python package that combines the powerful XGBoost software with weighted and focal losses to tackle binary label-imbalanced classification tasks. Though a small-scale program in terms of size, the package is, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first of its kind which prov…

In many applications of classifier learning, training data suffers from label noise. Deep networks are learned using huge training data where the problem of noisy labels is particularly relevant. The current techniques proposed for learning deep networks under label noise focus on modifying the network architecture and…

We unify f-divergences, Bregman divergences, surrogate loss bounds (regret bounds), proper scoring rules, matching losses, cost curves, ROC-curves and information. We do this by systematically studying integral and variational representations of these objects and in so doing identify their primitives which all are rela…

The F-measure, which has originally been introduced in information retrieval, is nowadays routinely used as a performance metric for problems such as binary classification, multi-label classification, and structured output prediction. Optimizing this measure is a statistically and computationally challenging problem, s…

Extends quadratic loss for SVM and deep learning to improve pattern correlation.

We introduce a novel scheme to train binary convolutional neural networks (CNNs) -- CNNs with weights and activations constrained to {-1,+1} at run-time. It has been known that using binary weights and activations drastically reduce memory size and accesses, and can replace arithmetic operations with more efficient bit…

In this note, we point out a basic link between generative adversarial (GA) training and binary classification -- any powerful discriminator essentially computes an (f-)divergence between real and generated samples. The result, repeatedly re-derived in decision theory, has implications for GA Networks (GANs), providing…

Cubic predicts stock market indices by fusing stock latent embeddings and converting to binary classification.

We consider the problem of learning linear classifiers when both features and labels are binary. In addition, the features are noisy, i.e., they could be flipped with an unknown probability. In Sy-De attribute noise model, where all features could be noisy together with same probability, we show that $0$-$1$ loss ($l_{…

We consider binary classification problems with positive definite kernels and square loss, and study the convergence rates of stochastic gradient methods. We show that while the excess testing loss (squared loss) converges slowly to zero as the number of observations (and thus iterations) goes to infinity, the testing …