Lecture

Introduction to Supervised Learning and Decision Theory

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In course

MATH-412: Statistical machine learning

A course on statistical machine learning for supervised and unsupervised learning ...

Description

This lecture introduces the concepts of supervised learning and decision theory, focusing on key elements such as loss function, risk, target function, and excess risk. It covers the formalization of supervised learning, decision theoretic framework, generalization, expected behavior, and the goal of minimizing risk.

Instructor

Yoav Zemel

Official source

Related concepts (31)

Decision-making

In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.

Info-gap decision theory

Info-gap decision theory seeks to optimize robustness to failure under severe uncertainty, in particular applying sensitivity analysis of the stability radius type to perturbations in the value of a given estimate of the parameter of interest. It has some connections with Wald's maximin model; some authors distinguish them, others consider them instances of the same principle. It has been developed by Yakov Ben-Haim, and has found many applications and described as a theory for decision-making under "severe uncertainty".

Supervised learning

Supervised learning (SL) is a paradigm in machine learning where input objects (for example, a vector of predictor variables) and a desired output value (also known as human-labeled supervisory signal) train a model. The training data is processed, building a function that maps new data on expected output values. An optimal scenario will allow for the algorithm to correctly determine output values for unseen instances. This requires the learning algorithm to generalize from the training data to unseen situations in a "reasonable" way (see inductive bias).

Unsupervised learning

Unsupervised learning, is paradigm in machine learning where, in contrast to supervised learning and semi-supervised learning, algorithms learn patterns exclusively from unlabeled data. Neural network tasks are often categorized as discriminative (recognition) or generative (imagination). Often but not always, discriminative tasks use supervised methods and generative tasks use unsupervised (see Venn diagram); however, the separation is very hazy. For example, object recognition favors supervised learning but unsupervised learning can also cluster objects into groups.

Self-supervised learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a paradigm in machine learning for processing data of lower quality, rather than improving ultimate outcomes. Self-supervised learning more closely imitates the way humans learn to classify objects. The typical SSL method is based on an artificial neural network or other model such as a decision list. The model learns in two steps. First, the task is solved based on an auxiliary or pretext classification task using pseudo-labels which help to initialize the model parameters.

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