Misclassification risk 2026-09-29
The misclassification risk of a classifier is its expected misclassification loss,
For define the misclassification loss
and take the loss class
Write and , so the misclassification risk and empirical misclassification risk are and .
Because is an empirical risk minimizer, . Hence its excess risk obeys
Introduce an independent ghost sample and perform Rademacher symmetrization. The contribution involving the fixed function has zero expectation over the Rademacher signs, so each of the two independent sample terms has supremum expectation . Therefore
Every difference takes values in . Replacing one observation can consequently change by at most . Applying the Bounded differences inequality with gives, except on an event of probability at most ,
Combining these inequalities proves, with probability at least ,