An Online Projection Estimator for Nonparametric Regression in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (2104.00780v1)

Abstract: The goal of nonparametric regression is to recover an underlying regression function from noisy observations, under the assumption that the regression function belongs to a pre-specified infinite dimensional function space. In the online setting, when the observations come in a stream, it is generally computationally infeasible to refit the whole model repeatedly. There are as of yet no methods that are both computationally efficient and statistically rate-optimal. In this paper, we propose an estimator for online nonparametric regression. Notably, our estimator is an empirical risk minimizer (ERM) in a deterministic linear space, which is quite different from existing methods using random features and functional stochastic gradient. Our theoretical analysis shows that this estimator obtains rate-optimal generalization error when the regression function is known to live in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We also show, theoretically and empirically, that the computational expense of our estimator is much lower than other rate-optimal estimators proposed for this online setting.