Cover's theorem

Last updated

Cover's theorem is a statement in computational learning theory and is one of the primary theoretical motivations for the use of non-linear kernel methods in machine learning applications. It is so termed after the information theorist Thomas M. Cover who stated it in 1965, referring to it as counting function theorem.

Contents

The Theorem

The theorem expresses the number of homogeneously linearly separable sets of points in dimensions as an explicit counting function of the number of points and the dimensionality .

It requires, as a necessary and sufficient condition, that the points are in general position. Simply put, this means that the points should be as linearly independent (non-aligned) as possible. This condition is satisfied "with probability 1" or almost surely for random point sets, while it may easily be violated for real data, since these are often structured along smaller-dimensionality manifolds within the data space.

The function follows two different regimes depending on the relationship between and .

A consequence of the theorem is that given a set of training data that is not linearly separable, one can with high probability transform it into a training set that is linearly separable by projecting it into a higher-dimensional space via some non-linear transformation, or:

A complex pattern-classification problem, cast in a high-dimensional space nonlinearly, is more likely to be linearly separable than in a low-dimensional space, provided that the space is not densely populated.

Proof

The proof of Cover's counting function theorem can be obtained from the recursive relation

To show that, with fixed , increasing may turn a set of points from non-separable to separable, a deterministic mapping may be used: suppose there are points. Lift them onto the vertices of the simplex in the dimensional real space. Since every partition of the samples into two sets is separable by a linear separator, the property follows.

The left image shows 100 points in the two dimensional real space, labelled according to whether they are inside or outside the circular area. These labelled points are not linearly separable, but lifting them to the three dimensional space with the kernel trick, the points becomes linearly separable. Note that in this case and in many other cases it will not be necessary to lift the points to the 99 dimensional space as assumed in the explanation. Kernel trick idea.svg
The left image shows 100 points in the two dimensional real space, labelled according to whether they are inside or outside the circular area. These labelled points are not linearly separable, but lifting them to the three dimensional space with the kernel trick, the points becomes linearly separable. Note that in this case and in many other cases it will not be necessary to lift the points to the 99 dimensional space as assumed in the explanation.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supervised learning</span> A paradigm in machine learning

Supervised learning (SL) is a paradigm in machine learning where input objects and a desired output value 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. This statistical quality of an algorithm is measured through the so-called generalization error.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Probability distribution</span> Mathematical function for the probability a given outcome occurs in an experiment

In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of different possible outcomes for an experiment. It is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon in terms of its sample space and the probabilities of events.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Support vector machine</span> Set of methods for supervised statistical learning

In machine learning, support vector machines are supervised learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Vladimir Vapnik with colleagues SVMs are one of the most robust prediction methods, being based on statistical learning frameworks or VC theory proposed by Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1974). Given a set of training examples, each marked as belonging to one of two categories, an SVM training algorithm builds a model that assigns new examples to one category or the other, making it a non-probabilistic binary linear classifier. SVM maps training examples to points in space so as to maximise the width of the gap between the two categories. New examples are then mapped into that same space and predicted to belong to a category based on which side of the gap they fall.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perceptron</span> Algorithm for supervised learning of binary classifiers

In machine learning, the perceptron is an algorithm for supervised learning of binary classifiers. A binary classifier is a function which can decide whether or not an input, represented by a vector of numbers, belongs to some specific class. It is a type of linear classifier, i.e. a classification algorithm that makes its predictions based on a linear predictor function combining a set of weights with the feature vector.

In probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a stochastic process, such that every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution, i.e. every finite linear combination of them is normally distributed. The distribution of a Gaussian process is the joint distribution of all those random variables, and as such, it is a distribution over functions with a continuous domain, e.g. time or space.

In mathematics, specifically functional analysis, Mercer's theorem is a representation of a symmetric positive-definite function on a square as a sum of a convergent sequence of product functions. This theorem, presented in, is one of the most notable results of the work of James Mercer (1883–1932). It is an important theoretical tool in the theory of integral equations; it is used in the Hilbert space theory of stochastic processes, for example the Karhunen–Loève theorem; and it is also used to characterize a symmetric positive-definite kernel.

In Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory, the Vapnik–Chervonenkis (VC) dimension is a measure of the capacity of a set of functions that can be learned by a statistical binary classification algorithm. It is defined as the cardinality of the largest set of points that the algorithm can shatter, which means the algorithm can always learn a perfect classifier for any labeling of at least one configuration of those data points. It was originally defined by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nonlinear dimensionality reduction</span> Summary of algorithms for nonlinear dimensionality reduction

Nonlinear dimensionality reduction, also known as manifold learning, refers to various related techniques that aim to project high-dimensional data onto lower-dimensional latent manifolds, with the goal of either visualizing the data in the low-dimensional space, or learning the mapping itself. The techniques described below can be understood as generalizations of linear decomposition methods used for dimensionality reduction, such as singular value decomposition and principal component analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linear separability</span>

In Euclidean geometry, linear separability is a property of two sets of points. This is most easily visualized in two dimensions by thinking of one set of points as being colored blue and the other set of points as being colored red. These two sets are linearly separable if there exists at least one line in the plane with all of the blue points on one side of the line and all the red points on the other side. This idea immediately generalizes to higher-dimensional Euclidean spaces if the line is replaced by a hyperplane.

The curse of dimensionality refers to various phenomena that arise when analyzing and organizing data in high-dimensional spaces that do not occur in low-dimensional settings such as the three-dimensional physical space of everyday experience. The expression was coined by Richard E. Bellman when considering problems in dynamic programming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kernel method</span> Class of algorithms for pattern analysis

In machine learning, kernel machines are a class of algorithms for pattern analysis, whose best known member is the support-vector machine (SVM). These methods involve using linear classifiers to solve nonlinear problems. The general task of pattern analysis is to find and study general types of relations in datasets. For many algorithms that solve these tasks, the data in raw representation have to be explicitly transformed into feature vector representations via a user-specified feature map: in contrast, kernel methods require only a user-specified kernel, i.e., a similarity function over all pairs of data points computed using inner products. The feature map in kernel machines is infinite dimensional but only requires a finite dimensional matrix from user-input according to the Representer theorem. Kernel machines are slow to compute for datasets larger than a couple of thousand examples without parallel processing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Softmax function</span> Smooth approximation of one-hot arg max

The softmax function, also known as softargmax or normalized exponential function, converts a vector of K real numbers into a probability distribution of K possible outcomes. It is a generalization of the logistic function to multiple dimensions, and used in multinomial logistic regression. The softmax function is often used as the last activation function of a neural network to normalize the output of a network to a probability distribution over predicted output classes, based on Luce's choice axiom.

In probability theory and statistics, the covariance function describes how much two random variables change together (their covariance) with varying spatial or temporal separation. For a random field or stochastic process Z(x) on a domain D, a covariance function C(xy) gives the covariance of the values of the random field at the two locations x and y:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mean shift</span> Mathematical technique

Mean shift is a non-parametric feature-space mathematical analysis technique for locating the maxima of a density function, a so-called mode-seeking algorithm. Application domains include cluster analysis in computer vision and image processing.

In mathematics, the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma is a result named after William B. Johnson and Joram Lindenstrauss concerning low-distortion embeddings of points from high-dimensional into low-dimensional Euclidean space. The lemma states that a set of points in a high-dimensional space can be embedded into a space of much lower dimension in such a way that distances between the points are nearly preserved. In the classical proof of the lemma, the embedding is a random orthogonal projection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hilbert space</span> Type of topological vector space

In mathematics, Hilbert spaces allow the methods of linear algebra and calculus to be generalized from (finite-dimensional) Euclidean vector spaces to spaces that may be infinite-dimensional. Hilbert spaces arise naturally and frequently in mathematics and physics, typically as function spaces. Formally, a Hilbert space is a vector space equipped with an inner product that induces a distance function for which the space is a complete metric space.

In probability theory and statistics, a collection of random variables is independent and identically distributed if each random variable has the same probability distribution as the others and all are mutually independent. This property is usually abbreviated as i.i.d., iid, or IID. IID was first defined in statistics and finds application in different fields such as data mining and signal processing.

In machine learning, the kernel embedding of distributions comprises a class of nonparametric methods in which a probability distribution is represented as an element of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). A generalization of the individual data-point feature mapping done in classical kernel methods, the embedding of distributions into infinite-dimensional feature spaces can preserve all of the statistical features of arbitrary distributions, while allowing one to compare and manipulate distributions using Hilbert space operations such as inner products, distances, projections, linear transformations, and spectral analysis. This learning framework is very general and can be applied to distributions over any space on which a sensible kernel function may be defined. For example, various kernels have been proposed for learning from data which are: vectors in , discrete classes/categories, strings, graphs/networks, images, time series, manifolds, dynamical systems, and other structured objects. The theory behind kernel embeddings of distributions has been primarily developed by Alex Smola, Le Song , Arthur Gretton, and Bernhard Schölkopf. A review of recent works on kernel embedding of distributions can be found in.

In mathematics and statistics, random projection is a technique used to reduce the dimensionality of a set of points which lie in Euclidean space. According to experimental results, random projection preserves distances well, but empirical results are sparse. They have been applied to many natural language tasks under the name random indexing.

References