Minimax semi-supervised confidence sets for multi-class classification

Abstract: In this work we study the semi-supervised framework of confidence set classification with controlled expected size in minimax settings. We obtain semi-supervised minimax rates of convergence under the margin assumption and a H{\"o}lder condition on the regression function. Besides, we show that if no further assumptions are made, there is no supervised method that outperforms the semi-supervised estimator proposed in this work. We establish that the best achievable rate for any supervised method is n^{--1/2} , even if the margin assumption is extremely favorable. On the contrary, semi-supervised estimators can achieve faster rates of convergence provided that sufficiently many unlabeled samples are available. We additionally perform numerical evaluation of the proposed algorithms empirically confirming our theoretical findings.