This paper shows that dropout training in Generalized Linear Models is the minimax solution of a two-player, zero-sum game where an adversarial nature corrupts a statistician's covariates using a multiplicative nonparametric errors-in-variables model. In this game---known as a Distributionally Robust Optimization problem---nature's least favorable distribution is dropout noise, where nature independently deletes entries of the covariate vector with some fixed probability $\delta$. Our decision-theoretic analysis shows that dropout training---the statistician's minimax strategy in the game---indeed provides out-of-sample expected loss guarantees for distributions that arise from multiplicative perturbations of in-sample data. This paper also provides a novel, parallelizable, Unbiased Multi-Level Monte Carlo algorithm to speed-up the implementation of dropout training. Our algorithm has a much smaller computational cost compared to the naive implementation of dropout, provided the number of data points is much smaller than the dimension of the covariate vector.

Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has been shown to provide a flexible framework for decision making under uncertainty and statistical estimation. For example, recent works in DRO have shown that popular statistical estimators can be interpreted as the solutions of suitable formulated data-driven DRO problems. In turn, this connection is used to optimally select tuning parameters in terms of a principled approach informed by robustness considerations. This paper contributes to this growing literature, connecting DRO and statistics, by showing how boosting algorithms can be studied via DRO. We propose a boosting type algorithm, named DRO-Boosting, as a procedure to solve our DRO formulation. Our DRO-Boosting algorithm recovers Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) in particular, thus showing that AdaBoost is effectively solving a DRO problem. We apply our algorithm to a financial dataset on credit card default payment prediction. We find that our approach compares favorably to alternative boosting methods which are widely used in practice.

We propose a novel method for semi-supervised learning (SSL) based on data-driven distributionally robust optimization (DRO) using optimal transport metrics. Our proposed method enhances generalization error by using the unlabeled data to restrict the support of the worst case distribution in our DRO formulation. We enable the implementation of our DRO formulation by proposing a stochastic gradient descent algorithm which allows to easily implement the training procedure. We demonstrate that our Semi-supervised DRO method is able to improve the generalization error over natural supervised procedures and state-of-the-art SSL estimators. Finally, we include a discussion on the large sample behavior of the optimal uncertainty region in the DRO formulation. Our discussion exposes important aspects such as the role of dimension reduction in SSL.

Data-driven Distributionally Robust Optimization (DD-DRO) via optimal transport has been shown to encompass a wide range of popular machine learning algorithms. The distributional uncertainty size is often shown to correspond to the regularization parameter. The type of regularization (e.g. the norm used to regularize) corresponds to the shape of the distributional uncertainty. We propose a data-driven robust optimization methodology to inform the transportation cost underlying the definition of the distributional uncertainty. We show empirically that this additional layer of robustification, which produces a method we called doubly robust data-driven distributionally robust optimization (DD-R-DRO), allows to enhance the generalization properties of regularized estimators while reducing testing error relative to state-of-the-art classifiers in a wide range of data sets.

Recently, (Blanchet, Kang, and Murhy 2016) showed that several machine learning algorithms, such as square-root Lasso, Support Vector Machines, and regularized logistic regression, among many others, can be represented exactly as distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems. The distributional uncertainty is defined as a neighborhood centered at the empirical distribution. We propose a methodology which learns such neighborhood in a natural data-driven way. We show rigorously that our framework encompasses adaptive regularization as a particular case. Moreover, we demonstrate empirically that our proposed methodology is able to improve upon a wide range of popular machine learning estimators.