Near-optimal delta-convex estimation of Lipschitz functions

This paper presents a tractable algorithm for estimating an unknown Lipschitz function from noisy observations and establishes an upper bound on its convergence rate. The approach extends max-affine methods from convex shape-restricted regression to the more general Lipschitz setting. A key component is a nonlinear feature expansion that maps max-affine functions into a subclass of delta-convex functions, which act as universal approximators of Lipschitz functions while preserving their Lipschitz constants. Leveraging this property, the estimator attains the minimax convergence rate (up to logarithmic factors) with respect to the intrinsic dimension of the data under squared loss and subgaussian distributions in the random design setting. The algorithm integrates adaptive partitioning to capture intrinsic dimension, a penalty-based regularization mechanism that removes the need to know the true Lipschitz constant, and a two-stage optimization procedure combining a convex initialization with local refinement. The framework is also straightforward to adapt to convex shape-restricted regression. Experiments demonstrate competitive performance relative to other theoretically justified methods, including nearest-neighbor and kernel-based regressors.

Chaining Bounds for Empirical Risk Minimization

This paper extends the standard chaining technique to prove excess risk upper bounds for empirical risk minimization with random design settings even if the magnitude of the noise and the estimates is unbounded. The bound applies to many loss functions besides the squared loss, and scales only with the sub-Gaussian or subexponential parameters without further statistical assumptions such as the bounded kurtosis condition over the hypothesis class. A detailed analysis is provided for slope constrained and penalized linear least squares regression with a sub-Gaussian setting, which often proves tight sample complexity bounds up to logartihmic factors.