Stratified learning: a general-purpose statistical method for improved learning under covariate shift
Author(s)
Autenrieth, Maximilian
van Dyk, David
Trotta, Roberto
Stenning, David
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We propose a simple, statistically principled, and theoretically justified method to improve supervised learning when the training set is not representative, a situation known as covariate shift. We build upon a well-established methodology in causal inference and show that the effects of covariate shift can be reduced or eliminated by conditioning on propensity scores. In practice, this is achieved by fitting learners within strata constructed by partitioning the data based on the estimated propensity scores, leading to approximately balanced covariates and much-improved target prediction. We refer to the overall method as Stratified Learning, or StratLearn. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this general-purpose method on two contemporary research questions in cosmology, outperforming state-of-the-art importance weighting methods. We obtain the best-reported AUC (0.958) on the updated “Supernovae photometric classification challenge,” and we improve upon existing conditional density estimation of galaxy redshift from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data.
Date Issued
2024-02-01
Date Acceptance
2023-08-24
Citation
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, 2024, 17 (1)
ISSN
1932-1864
Publisher
Wiley
Journal / Book Title
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
Volume
17
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Authors. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: The ASA Data Science Journal published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sam.11643?af=R
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e11643
Date Publish Online
2023-09-29