提出新投注法,让置信区间更紧,采样成本高时效果显著。
STaR-Bets: Sequential Target-Recalculating Bets for Tighter Confidence Intervals
- 每步动态调整投注策略,比固定策略更优。
- 置信区间宽度逼近最优的 $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\frac{σ^2\log\frac1δ}{n}})$,渐近最优。
- 适合采样昂贵场景,如机器学习模型评估、实验设计等。
对有界随机变量均值构造置信区间是统计学经典问题,在机器学习和几乎所有科学领域均有应用。当采样成本高昂时,获得最紧凑的置信区间至关重要。当前最优方法是基于投注算法构建置信序列,虽能匹配迭代对数律速率,但在固定采样数场景下,现有方法或次优,或依赖无有限时间保证的启发式方案。本文填补此空白,提出一种基于投注的新算法,可计算出比现有方法更紧的置信区间。该策略在每一步采用最优投注方式(某种意义下),而传统方法预先设定恒定策略。利用此机制,即使对经典的霍夫丁或伯恩斯坦不等式也带来严格改进。此外,我们证明所生成置信区间的宽度在样本量 $n$ 增大时,逼近最优 $1+o(1)$ 因子。代码已开源:https://github.com/vvoracek/STaR-bets-confidence-interval。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The construction of confidence intervals for the mean of a bounded random variable is a classical problem in statistics with numerous applications in machine learning and virtually all scientific fields. In particular, obtaining the tightest possible confidence intervals is vital every time the sampling of the random variables is expensive. The current state-of-the-art method to construct confidence intervals is by using betting algorithms. This is a very successful approach for deriving optimal confidence sequences, even matching the rate of law of iterated logarithms. However, in the fixed horizon setting, these approaches are either sub-optimal or based on heuristic solutions with strong empirical performance but without a finite-time guarantee. Hence, no betting-based algorithm guaranteeing the optimal $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\frac{σ^2\log\frac1δ}{n}})$ width of the confidence intervals are known. This work bridges this gap. We propose a betting-based algorithm to compute confidence intervals that empirically outperforms the competitors. Our betting strategy uses the optimal strategy in every step (in a certain sense), whereas the standard betting methods choose a constant strategy in advance. Leveraging this fact results in strict improvements even for classical concentration inequalities, such as the ones of Hoeffding or Bernstein. Moreover, we also prove that the width of our confidence intervals is optimal up to an $1+o(1)$ factor diminishing with $n$. The code is available at https://github.com/vvoracek/STaR-bets-confidence-interval.
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