Mistake Bounds for Maximum Entropy Discrimination

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17 (NIPS 2004)

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Authors

Philip Long, Xinyu Wu

Abstract

We establish a mistake bound for an ensemble method for classification based on maximizing the entropy of voting weights subject to margin constraints. The bound is the same as a general bound proved for the Weighted Majority Algorithm, and similar to bounds for other variants of Winnow. We prove a more refined bound that leads to a nearly opti- mal algorithm for learning disjunctions, again, based on the maximum entropy principle. We describe a simplification of the on-line maximum entropy method in which, after each iteration, the margin constraints are replaced with a single linear inequality. The simplified algorithm, which takes a similar form to Winnow, achieves the same mistake bounds.