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James Ridgway

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JMLR Journal 2016 Journal Article

On the properties of variational approximations of Gibbs posteriors

Pierre Alquier
James Ridgway
Nicolas Chopin

The PAC-Bayesian approach is a powerful set of techniques to derive non-asymptotic risk bounds for random estimators. The corresponding optimal distribution of estimators, usually called the Gibbs posterior, is unfortunately often intractable. One may sample from it using Markov chain Monte Carlo, but this is usually too slow for big datasets. We consider instead variational approximations of the Gibbs posterior, which are fast to compute. We undertake a general study of the properties of such approximations. Our main finding is that such a variational approximation has often the same rate of convergence as the original PAC-Bayesian procedure it approximates. In addition, we show that, when the risk function is convex, a variational approximation can be obtained in polynomial time using a convex solver. We give finite sample oracle inequalities for the corresponding estimator. We specialize our results to several learning tasks (classification, ranking, matrix completion), discuss how to implement a variational approximation in each case, and illustrate the good properties of said approximation on real datasets. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2016. ( edit, beta )

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NeurIPS Conference 2014 Conference Paper

PAC-Bayesian AUC classification and scoring

James Ridgway
Pierre Alquier
Nicolas Chopin
Feng Liang

We develop a scoring and classification procedure based on the PAC-Bayesian approach and the AUC (Area Under Curve) criterion. We focus initially on the class of linear score functions. We derive PAC-Bayesian non-asymptotic bounds for two types of prior for the score parameters: a Gaussian prior, and a spike-and-slab prior; the latter makes it possible to perform feature selection. One important advantage of our approach is that it is amenable to powerful Bayesian computational tools. We derive in particular a Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, as an efficient method which may be used as a gold standard, and an Expectation-Propagation algorithm, as a much faster but approximate method. We also extend our method to a class of non-linear score functions, essentially leading to a nonparametric procedure, by considering a Gaussian process prior.

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