{"title":"Hoeffding's inequality for general Markov chains with its applications to statistical learning.","authors":"Jianqing Fan, Bai Jiang, Qiang Sun","doi":"","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper establishes Hoeffding's lemma and inequality for bounded functions of general-state-space and not necessarily reversible Markov chains. The sharpness of these results is characterized by the optimality of the ratio between variance proxies in the Markov-dependent and independent settings. The boundedness of functions is shown necessary for such results to hold in general. To showcase the usefulness of the new results, we apply them for non-asymptotic analyses of MCMC estimation, respondent-driven sampling and high-dimensional covariance matrix estimation on time series data with a Markovian nature. In addition to statistical problems, we also apply them to study the time-discounted rewards in econometric models and the multi-armed bandit problem with Markovian rewards arising from the field of machine learning.</p>","PeriodicalId":50161,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Machine Learning Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3000,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8457514/pdf/nihms-1639585.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Machine Learning Research","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"AUTOMATION & CONTROL SYSTEMS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper establishes Hoeffding's lemma and inequality for bounded functions of general-state-space and not necessarily reversible Markov chains. The sharpness of these results is characterized by the optimality of the ratio between variance proxies in the Markov-dependent and independent settings. The boundedness of functions is shown necessary for such results to hold in general. To showcase the usefulness of the new results, we apply them for non-asymptotic analyses of MCMC estimation, respondent-driven sampling and high-dimensional covariance matrix estimation on time series data with a Markovian nature. In addition to statistical problems, we also apply them to study the time-discounted rewards in econometric models and the multi-armed bandit problem with Markovian rewards arising from the field of machine learning.
期刊介绍：
The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) provides an international forum for the electronic and paper publication of high-quality scholarly articles in all areas of machine learning. All published papers are freely available online.
JMLR has a commitment to rigorous yet rapid reviewing.
JMLR seeks previously unpublished papers on machine learning that contain:
new principled algorithms with sound empirical validation, and with justification of theoretical, psychological, or biological nature;
experimental and/or theoretical studies yielding new insight into the design and behavior of learning in intelligent systems;
accounts of applications of existing techniques that shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of the methods;
formalization of new learning tasks (e.g., in the context of new applications) and of methods for assessing performance on those tasks;
development of new analytical frameworks that advance theoretical studies of practical learning methods;
computational models of data from natural learning systems at the behavioral or neural level; or extremely well-written surveys of existing work.
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