有限模型容量下,带代价敏感的损失能更好提升分类决策性能。
Contrasting Cost-Agnostic and Cost-Sensitive Losses under Limited Model Capacity via $\mathcal H$-consistency
- 通过理论分析对比无代价与有代价损失在有限模型能力下的表现差异。
- 在简单模型和UCI数据集上,代价敏感训练比事后调阈值更优。
- 适用于需要精准决策的场景,如医疗诊断或金融风控。
机器学习中存在争议:应训练模型优化任务无关目标(如交叉熵)还是将下游决策任务融入优化目标(如加权交叉熵)。理想情况下,两者等价;但在实际中,后者常带来更好的任务表现。本文聚焦于模型容量受限的场景,基于假设类 $\/mathcal H$,证明了仅用成本无关目标训练后通过阈值调整与直接优化成本敏感目标之间存在严格性能差距。当最优决策边界可被某个假设逼近但不与最优成本无关假设对齐时,该差距成立。我们通过简单例子说明其合理性,并在来自UCI数据库的分类数据集上验证了这一差距普遍存在,尤其在使用极简模型时。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
There is a prevalent debate in machine learning about whether practitioners should train models to optimize a task-agnostic objective (e.g., cross entropy) or incorporate the downstream decision task into the optimization objective (e.g., weighted cross entropy). In ideal settings, like those with infinite data and infinite model capacity, the two approaches are statistically equivalent for the downstream decision task. In practice, however, incorporating the decision task into model training has been shown to empirically improve task-specific performance in certain real-world scenarios. The cause of these benefits has not been theoretically studied to date. Focusing on the setting with limited model capacity through the model class $\mathcal H$, we establish a strict performance gap between post-processing a model learned with a cost-agnostic objective (e.g., thresholding a risk score prediction) and models learned by optimizing a cost-sensitive model without a threshold search. In particular, we establish this gap when there is a hypothesis recovering the optimal decision boundary for the discrete task, but it does not align with the optimal cost-agnostic hypothesis, and give a simple example demonstrating the plausibility of this setting. With assumptions that are hard to verify in practice, we demonstrate that this gap generally exists on classification datasets from the UCI repository, particularly with very simple models.
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