# Some More Results on the Theory of Statistical Learning

March 8, 2015
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(This article was first published on Freakonometrics » R-english, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Yesterday, I did mention a popular graph discussed when studying theoretical foundations of statistical learning. But there is usually another one, which is the following,

Let us get back to the underlying formulas. On the traning sample, we have some empirical risk, defined as

for some loss function . Why is it complicated ?

From the law of large numbers,

when the ‘s are i.i.d., and . Here we look for

It is difficult to say something about the limit, since the ‘s are independent, but the ‘s, because of  (which dependends on the entire sample).

But if we look at the empirical risk on a validation sample

One can prove that, with probability ,

which depends on  (as discussed in the previous post), but also about that parameter, the so-called Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension.

I won’t spend hours on that dimension, but the idea is that this dimension is related to the model complexity. For instance, in dimension one (one covariate), if  is a polynomial of degree , then . In dimension two (two covariates), if  is a (bivariate) polynomial of degree , then , while it would be  if is additive, with two polynomials of degree .

Let us try to get a graph which looks like the one above, using the same idea as the one in our previous post.

```MissClassU=rep(NA,25)
MissClassV=rep(NA,25)
n=200
U=data.frame(X1=runif(n),X2=runif(n))
p=(U[,1]+U[,2])/2
U\$Y=rbinom(n,size=1,prob=p)
V=data.frame(X1=runif(n),X2=runif(n))
p=(V[,1]+V[,2])/2
V\$Y=rbinom(n,size=1,prob=p)
for(s in 1:25){
reg=glm(Y~poly(X1,s)+poly(X2,s),data=U,
family=binomial)
pd=function(x1,x2) predict(reg,newdata=data.frame(X1=x1,X2=x2),type="response")>.5
MissClassU[s]=mean(abs(pd(U\$X1,U\$X2)-U\$Y))
MissClassV[s]=mean(abs(pd(V\$X1,V\$X2)-V\$Y))
}```

If we plot the missclassification rate, as a function of the polynomial degree, in purple on the validation sample, and in black on the training sample, we get

Again, it is on one sample, only. We can run it on hundreds, and see how the average risk of misclassification changes with complexity.

```MCU=rep(NA,500)
MCV=rep(NA,500)

missclassification=function(s){
for(i in 1:500){
U=data.frame(X1=runif(n),X2=runif(n))
p=(U[,1]+U[,2])/2
U\$Y=rbinom(n,size=1,prob=p)
reg=glm(Y~bs(X1,s)+bs(X2,s),data=U,
family=binomial)
pd=function(x1,x2) predict(reg,newdata=data.frame(X1=x1,X2=x2),type="response")>.5
MCU[i]=mean(abs(pd(U\$X1,U\$X2)-U\$Y))
V=data.frame(X1=runif(n),X2=runif(n))
p=(V[,1]+V[,2])/2
V\$Y=rbinom(n,size=1,prob=p)
MCV[i]=mean(abs(pd(V\$X1,V\$X2)-V\$Y))
}
MissClassV=mean(MCU)
MissClassU=mean(MCV)
return(c(MissClassU,MissClassV))
}```

Here, we cannot see the optimal dimension, because our risk on the validation samples keeps increasing. Which makes sence since our data are generated from a linear model, so the optimal transformation should be optained with linear transformation (and not polynomials with higher degrees).

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