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58 nips-2005-Divergences, surrogate loss functions and experimental design


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Author: Xuanlong Nguyen, Martin J. Wainwright, Michael I. Jordan

Abstract: In this paper, we provide a general theorem that establishes a correspondence between surrogate loss functions in classification and the family of f -divergences. Moreover, we provide constructive procedures for determining the f -divergence induced by a given surrogate loss, and conversely for finding all surrogate loss functions that realize a given f -divergence. Next we introduce the notion of universal equivalence among loss functions and corresponding f -divergences, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for universal equivalence to hold. These ideas have applications to classification problems that also involve a component of experiment design; in particular, we leverage our results to prove consistency of a procedure for learning a classifier under decentralization requirements. 1


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