2020

Reasoning About Generalization via Conditional Mutual Information

Steinke, Thomas, Zakynthinou, Lydia

Understand

We provide an information-theoretic framework for studying the generalization properties of machine learning algorithms.

  • Our framework ties together existing approaches, including uniform convergence bounds and recent methods for adaptive data analysis.
  • Specifically, we use Conditional Mutual Information (CMI) to quantify how well the input (i.e., the training data) can be recognized given the output (i.e., the trained model) of the learning algorithm.
  • We show that bounds on CMI can be obtained from VC dimension, compression schemes, differential privacy, and other methods.

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