Model selection is a crucial issue in machine-learning and a wide variety of penalisation methods (with possibly data dependent complexity penalties) have recently been introduced for this purpose. However their empirical performance is generally not well documented in the literature. It is the goal of this paper to investigate to which extent such recent techniques can be successfully used for the tuning of both the regularisation and kernel parameters in support vector regression (SVR) and the complexity measure in regression trees (CART). This task is traditionally solved via V-fold cross-validation (VFCV), which gives efficient results for a reasonable computational cost. A disadvantage however of VFCV is that the procedure is known to provide an asymptotically suboptimal risk estimate as the number of examples tends to infinity. Recently, a penalisation procedure called V-fold penalisation has been proposed to improve on VFCV, supported by theoretical arguments. Here we report on an extensive set of experiments comparing V-fold penalisation and VFCV for SVR/CART calibration on several benchmark datasets. We highlight cases in which VFCV and V-fold penalisation provide poor estimates of the risk respectively and introduce a modified penalisation technique to reduce the estimation error.

We study the efficiency of V-fold cross-validation (VFCV) for model selection from the non-asymptotic viewpoint, and suggest an improvement on it, which we call ``V-fold penalization''. Considering a particular (though simple) regression problem, we prove that VFCV with a bounded V is suboptimal for model selection, because it ``overpenalizes'' all the more that V is large. Hence, asymptotic optimality requires V to go to infinity. However, when the signal-to-noise ratio is low, it appears that overpenalizing is necessary, so that the optimal V is not always the larger one, despite of the variability issue. This is confirmed by some simulated data. In order to improve on the prediction performance of VFCV, we define a new model selection procedure, called ``V-fold penalization'' (penVF). It is a V-fold subsampling version of Efron's bootstrap penalties, so that it has the same computational cost as VFCV, while being more flexible. In a heteroscedastic regression framework, assuming the models to have a particular structure, we prove that penVF satisfies a non-asymptotic oracle inequality with a leading constant that tends to 1 when the sample size goes to infinity. In particular, this implies adaptivity to the smoothness of the regression function, even with a highly heteroscedastic noise. Moreover, it is easy to overpenalize with penVF, independently from the V parameter. A simulation study shows that this results in a significant improvement on VFCV in non-asymptotic situations.