AISTATS 2021poster8 citations

A constrained risk inequality for general losses

John Duchi, Feng Ruan

Abstract

We provide a general constrained risk inequality that applies to arbitrary non-decreasing losses, extending a result of Brown and Low [\emph{Ann. Stat. 1996}]. Given two distributions $P_0$ and $P_1$, we find a lower bound for the risk of estimating a parameter $\theta(P_1)$ under $P_1$ given an upper bound on the risk of estimating the parameter $\theta(P_0)$ under $P_0$. The inequality is a useful pedagogical tool, as its proof relies only on the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, it applies to general losses, and it transparently gives risk lower bounds on super-efficient and adaptive estimators.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v130-duchi21a,
  title = 	 { A constrained risk inequality for general losses },
  author =       {Duchi, John and Ruan, Feng},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of The 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = 	 {802--810},
  year = 	 {2021},
  editor = 	 {Banerjee, Arindam and Fukumizu, Kenji},
  volume = 	 {130},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {13--15 Apr},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v130/duchi21a/duchi21a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v130/duchi21a.html},
  abstract = 	 { We provide a general constrained risk inequality that applies to arbitrary non-decreasing losses, extending a result of Brown and Low [\emph{Ann. Stat. 1996}]. Given two distributions $P_0$ and $P_1$, we find a lower bound for the risk of estimating a parameter $\theta(P_1)$ under $P_1$ given an upper bound on the risk of estimating the parameter $\theta(P_0)$ under $P_0$. The inequality is a useful pedagogical tool, as its proof relies only on the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, it applies to general losses, and it transparently gives risk lower bounds on super-efficient and adaptive estimators. }
}
A constrained risk inequality for general losses · AISTATS 2021