Adopting Robustness and Optimality in Fitting and Learning

Zhiguang Wang, Tim Oates, James Lo

Published 2015-10-13Version 1

We generalized a modified exponentialized estimator by pushing the robust-optimal (RO) index $\lambda$ to $-\infty$ for achieving robustness to outliers by optimizing a quasi-Minimin function. The robustness is realized and controlled adaptively by the RO index without any predefined threshold. Optimality is guaranteed by expansion of the convexity region in the Hessian matrix to largely avoid local optima. Detailed quantitative analysis on both robustness and optimality are provided. The results of proposed experiments on fitting tasks for three noisy non-convex functions and the digits recognition task on the MNIST dataset consolidate the conclusions.