A universally consistent learning rule with a universally monotone error

08/22/2021

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by   Vladimir Pestov, et al.

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We present a universally consistent learning rule whose expected error is monotone non-increasing with the sample size under every data distribution. The question of existence of such rules was brought up in 1996 by Devroye, Györfi and Lugosi (who called them "smart"). Our rule is fully deterministic, a data-dependent partitioning rule constructed in an arbitrary domain (a standard Borel space) using a cyclic order. The central idea is to only partition at each step those cyclic intervals that exhibit a sufficient empirical diversity of labels, thus avoiding a region where the error function is convex.