Fine-grained analysis of non-parametric estimation for pairwise learning

Abstract: In this paper, we are concerned with the generalization performance of non-parametric estimation for pairwise learning. Most of the existing work requires the hypothesis space to be convex or a VC-class, and the loss to be convex. However, these restrictive assumptions limit the applicability of the results in studying many popular methods, especially kernel methods and neural networks. We significantly relax these restrictive assumptions and establish a sharp oracle inequality of the empirical minimizer with a general hypothesis space for the Lipschitz continuous pairwise losses. Our results can be used to handle a wide range of pairwise learning problems including ranking, AUC maximization, pairwise regression, and metric and similarity learning. As an application, we apply our general results to study pairwise least squares regression and derive an excess generalization bound that matches the minimax lower bound for pointwise least squares regression up to a logrithmic term. The key novelty here is to construct a structured deep ReLU neural network as an approximation of the true predictor and design the targeted hypothesis space consisting of the structured networks with controllable complexity. This successful application demonstrates that the obtained general results indeed help us to explore the generalization performance on a variety of problems that cannot be handled by existing approaches.