AISTATS 2019poster8 citations

Pseudo-Bayesian Learning with Kernel Fourier Transform as Prior

Gaël Letarte, Emilie Morvant, Pascal Germain

Abstract

We revisit Rahimi and Recht (2007)’s kernel random Fourier features (RFF) method through the lens of the PAC-Bayesian theory. While the primary goal of RFF is to approximate a kernel, we look at the Fourier transform as a prior distribution over trigonometric hypotheses. It naturally suggests learning a posterior on these hypotheses. We derive generalization bounds that are optimized by learning a pseudo-posterior obtained from a closed-form expression. Based on this study, we consider two learning strategies: The first one finds a compact landmarks-based representation of the data where each landmark is given by a distribution-tailored similarity measure, while the second one provides a PAC-Bayesian justification to the kernel alignment method of Sinha and Duchi (2016).

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v89-letarte19a,
  title = 	 {Pseudo-Bayesian Learning with Kernel Fourier Transform as Prior},
  author =       {Letarte, Ga\"{e}l and Morvant, Emilie and Germain, Pascal},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = 	 {768--776},
  year = 	 {2019},
  editor = 	 {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Sugiyama, Masashi},
  volume = 	 {89},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {16--18 Apr},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v89/letarte19a/letarte19a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v89/letarte19a.html},
  abstract = 	 {We revisit Rahimi and Recht (2007)’s kernel random Fourier features (RFF) method through the lens of the PAC-Bayesian theory. While the primary goal of RFF is to approximate a kernel, we look at the Fourier transform as a prior distribution over trigonometric hypotheses. It naturally suggests learning a posterior on these hypotheses. We derive generalization bounds that are optimized by learning a pseudo-posterior obtained from a closed-form expression. Based on this study, we consider two learning strategies: The first one finds a compact landmarks-based representation of the data where each landmark is given by a distribution-tailored similarity measure, while the second one provides a PAC-Bayesian justification to the kernel alignment method of Sinha and Duchi (2016).}
}
Pseudo-Bayesian Learning with Kernel Fourier Transform as Prior · AISTATS 2019