Distribution-free performance bounds for potential function rules
In the discrimination problem the random variable \theta , known to take values in {1, \cdots ,M} , is estimated from the random vector X . All that is known about the joint distribution of (X, \theta) is that which can be inferred from a sample (X_{1}, \theta_{1}), \cdots ,(X_{n}, \theta_{n}) of size n drawn from that distribution. A discrimination nde is any procedure which determines a decision \hat{ \theta} for \theta from X and (X_{1}, \theta_{1}) , \cdots , (X_{n}, \theta_{n}) . For rules which are determined by potential functions it is shown that the mean-square difference between the probability of error for the nde and its deleted estimate is bounded by A/ \sqrt{n} where A is an explicitly given constant depending only on M and the potential function. The O(n ^{-1/2}) behavior is shown to be the best possible for one of the most commonly encountered rules of this type.