Optimal Convergence Rates for the Orthogonal Greedy Algorithm

Jonathan W. Siegel, Jinchao Xu

Abstract: We analyze the orthogonal greedy algorithm when applied to dictionaries <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbb {D}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> whose convex hull has small entropy. We show that if the metric entropy of the convex hull of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbb {D}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> decays at a rate of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O\left({n^{-\frac {1}{2}-\alpha }}\right)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha &gt; 0$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , then the orthogonal greedy algorithm converges at the same rate on the variation space of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbb {D}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . This improves upon the well-known <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O\left({n^{-\frac {1}{2}}}\right)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> convergence rate of the orthogonal greedy algorithm in many cases, most notably for dictionaries corresponding to shallow neural networks. These results hold under no additional assumptions on the dictionary beyond the decay rate of the entropy of its convex hull. In addition, they are robust to noise in the target function and can be extended to convergence rates on the interpolation spaces of the variation norm. We show empirically that the predicted rates are obtained for the dictionary corresponding to shallow neural networks with Heaviside activation function in two dimensions. Finally, we show that these improved rates are sharp and prove a negative result showing that the iterates generated by the orthogonal greedy algorithm cannot in general be bounded in the variation norm of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbb {D}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> .