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Poster

Early Stopping for Nonparametric Testing

Meimei Liu · Guang Cheng

Room 517 AB #101

Keywords: [ Learning Theory ] [ Regularization ]


Abstract:

Early stopping of iterative algorithms is an algorithmic regularization method to avoid over-fitting in estimation and classification. In this paper, we show that early stopping can also be applied to obtain the minimax optimal testing in a general non-parametric setup. Specifically, a Wald-type test statistic is obtained based on an iterated estimate produced by functional gradient descent algorithms in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. A notable contribution is to establish a ``sharp'' stopping rule: when the number of iterations achieves an optimal order, testing optimality is achievable; otherwise, testing optimality becomes impossible. As a by-product, a similar sharpness result is also derived for minimax optimal estimation under early stopping. All obtained results hold for various kernel classes, including Sobolev smoothness classes and Gaussian kernel classes.

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