Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track
Aras Selvi, Mohammad Reza Belbasi, Martin Haugh, Wolfram Wiesemann
Recent work has leveraged the popular distributionally robust optimization paradigm to combat overfitting in classical logistic regression. While the resulting classification scheme displays a promising performance in numerical experiments, it is inherently limited to numerical features. In this paper, we show that distributionally robust logistic regression with mixed (\emph{i.e.}, numerical and categorical) features, despite amounting to an optimization problem of exponential size, admits a polynomial-time solution scheme. We subsequently develop a practically efficient cutting plane approach that solves the problem as a sequence of polynomial-time solvable exponential conic programs. Our method retains many of the desirable theoretical features of previous works, but---in contrast to the literature---it does not admit an equivalent representation as a regularized logistic regression, that is, it represents a genuinely novel variant of the logistic regression problem. We show that our method outperforms both the unregularized and the regularized logistic regression on categorical as well as mixed-feature benchmark instances.