A witness function based construction of discriminative models using Hermite polynomials

Abstract: In machine learning, we are given a dataset of the form ${(\mathbf{x}j,y_j)}{j=1}^M$, drawn as i.i.d. samples from an unknown probability distribution $\mu$; the marginal distribution for the $\mathbf{x}_j$'s being $\mu^*$. We propose that rather than using a positive kernel such as the Gaussian for estimation of these measures, using a non-positive kernel that preserves a large number of moments of these measures yields an optimal approximation. We use multi-variate Hermite polynomials for this purpose, and prove optimal and local approximation results in a supremum norm in a probabilistic sense. Together with a permutation test developed with the same kernel, we prove that the kernel estimator serves as a `witness function' in classification problems. Thus, if the value of this estimator at a point $\mathbf{x}$ exceeds a certain threshold, then the point is reliably in a certain class. This approach can be used to modify pretrained algorithms, such as neural networks or nonlinear dimension reduction techniques, to identify in-class vs out-of-class regions for the purposes of generative models, classification uncertainty, or finding robust centroids. This fact is demonstrated in a number of real world data sets including MNIST, CIFAR10, Science News documents, and LaLonde data sets.