Home

PAC-Bayesian model averaging


Author(s) : David A. Mcallester, 
Publisher : N/A
Publication Date : 1999
ISSN : N/A
Abstract : PAC-Bayesian learning methods combine the informative priors of Bayesian methods with distribution-free PAC guarantees. Building on earlier methods for PAC-Bayesian model selection, this paper presents a method for PAC-Bayesian model averaging. The main result is a bound on generalization error of an arbitrary weighted mixture of concepts that depends on the empirical error of that mixture and the KLdivergence of the mixture from the prior. A simple characterization is also given for the error bound achieved by the optimal weighting. 1,