Chance constrained uncertain classification via robust optimization

  • Authors:
  • Aharon Ben-Tal;Sahely Bhadra;Chiranjib Bhattacharyya;J. Saketha Nath

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, MINERVA Optimization Center, 32000, Technion, Haifa, Israel and CentER, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands;Indian Institute of Science, Department of Computer Science and Automation, 560012, Bangalore, India;Indian Institute of Science, Department of Computer Science and Automation, 560012, Bangalore, India;Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Department of Computer Science, Mumbai, India

  • Venue:
  • Mathematical Programming: Series A and B - Special Issue on "Optimization and Machine learning"; Alexandre d’Aspremont • Francis Bach • Inderjit S. Dhillon • Bin Yu
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper studies the problem of constructing robust classifiers when the training is plagued with uncertainty. The problem is posed as a Chance-Constrained Program (CCP) which ensures that the uncertain data points are classified correctly with high probability. Unfortunately such a CCP turns out to be intractable. The key novelty is in employing Bernstein bounding schemes to relax the CCP as a convex second order cone program whose solution is guaranteed to satisfy the probabilistic constraint. Prior to this work, only the Chebyshev based relaxations were exploited in learning algorithms. Bernstein bounds employ richer partial information and hence can be far less conservative than Chebyshev bounds. Due to this efficient modeling of uncertainty, the resulting classifiers achieve higher classification margins and hence better generalization. Methodologies for classifying uncertain test data points and error measures for evaluating classifiers robust to uncertain data are discussed. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed classifiers are better equipped to handle data uncertainty and outperform state-of-the-art in many cases.