Derandomizing Stochastic Prediction Strategies

  • Authors:
  • V. Vovk

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK. vovk@dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk

  • Venue:
  • Machine Learning - Special issue: computational learning theory, COLT '97
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In this paper we continue study of the games of predictionwith expert advice with uncountably many experts. A convenientinterpretation of such games is to construe the pool of experts asone “stochastic predictor”, who chooses one of theexperts in the pool at random according to the prior distribution onthe experts and then replicates the (deterministic )predictions of the chosen expert. We notice that if the stochasticpredictor‘s total loss is at most L with probability atleast p then the learner‘s loss can be bounded bycL + aln \frac{1}{p} for the usualconstants c and a. This interpretation is used torevamp known results and obtain new results on tracking the bestexpert. It is also applied to merging overconfident experts and tofitting polynomials to data.