Regularized ERM on random subspaces

Abstract

We study a natural extension of classical empirical risk minimization, where the hypothesis space is a random subspace of a given space. In particular, we consider possibly data dependent subspaces spanned by a random subset of the data. This approach naturally leads to computational savings, but the question is whether the corresponding learning accuracy is degraded. These statistical-computational tradeoffs have been recently explored for the least squares loss and self-concordant loss functions, such as the logistic loss. Here, we work to extend these results to convex Lipschitz loss functions, that might not be smooth, such as the hinge loss used in support vector machines. Our main results show the existence of different regimes, depending on how hard the learning problem is, for which computational efficiency can be improved with no loss in performance. Theoretical results are complemented with numerical experiments on large scale benchmark data sets.