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Collaborating Authors

 validation data



Supplementary Material

Neural Information Processing Systems

The supplementary material is organized as follows. We give details of the definitions and notation in Section B.1 . Then, we provide the technical details of the lower bound (Lemma 3.3). In Section D.4 we provide insights into auto-labeling using This suggests, in these settings auto-labeling using active learning followed by selective classification is expected to work well. This idea is captured by the Chow's excess risk [ Nevertheless, it would be interesting future work to explore the connections between auto-labeling and active learning with abstention.







Test-Time Collective Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

An increasingly common setting in machine learning involves multiple parties, each with their own data, who want to jointly make predictions on future test points. Agents wish to benefit from the collective expertise of the full set of agents to make better predictions than they would individually, but may not be willing to release labeled data or model parameters.


The Nonstationarity-Complexity Tradeoff in Return Prediction

Capponi, Agostino, Huang, Chengpiao, Sidaoui, J. Antonio, Wang, Kaizheng, Zou, Jiacheng

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We investigate machine learning models for stock return prediction in non-stationary environments, revealing a fundamental nonstationarity-complexity tradeoff: complex models reduce misspecification error but require longer training windows that introduce stronger non-stationarity. We resolve this tension with a novel model selection method that jointly optimizes model class and training window size using a tournament procedure that adaptively evaluates candidates on non-stationary validation data. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this approach balances misspecification error, estimation variance, and non-stationarity, performing close to the best model in hindsight. Applying our method to 17 industry portfolio returns, we consistently outperform standard rolling-window benchmarks, improving out-of-sample $R^2$ by 14-23% on average. During NBER-designated recessions, improvements are substantial: our method achieves positive $R^2$ during the Gulf War recession while benchmarks are negative, and improves $R^2$ in absolute terms by at least 80bps during the 2001 recession as well as superior performance during the 2008 Financial Crisis. Economically, a trading strategy based on our selected model generates 31% higher cumulative returns averaged across the industries.


Promises and Pitfalls of Threshold-based Auto-labeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Creating large-scale high-quality labeled datasets is a major bottleneck in supervised machine learning workflows. Threshold-based auto-labeling (TBAL), where validation data obtained from humans is used to find a confidence threshold above which the data is machine-labeled, reduces reliance on manual annotation. TBAL is emerging as a widely-used solution in practice. Given the long shelf-life and diverse usage of the resulting datasets, understanding when the data obtained by such auto-labeling systems can be relied on is crucial. This is the first work to analyze TBAL systems and derive sample complexity bounds on the amount of human-labeled validation data required for guaranteeing the quality of machine-labeled data. Our results provide two crucial insights. First, reasonable chunks of unlabeled data can be automatically and accurately labeled by seemingly bad models. Second, a hidden downside of TBAL systems is potentially prohibitive validation data usage. Together, these insights describe the promise and pitfalls of using such systems.