We study the approximation capacity of some variation spaces corresponding to shallow ReLU$^k$ neural networks. It is shown that sufficiently smooth functions are contained in these spaces with finite variation norms. For functions with less smoothness, the approximation rates in terms of the variation norm are established. Using these results, we are able to prove the optimal approximation rates in terms of the number of neurons for shallow ReLU$^k$ neural networks. It is also shown how these results can be used to derive approximation bounds for deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). As applications, we study convergence rates for nonparametric regression using three ReLU neural network models: shallow neural network, over-parameterized neural network, and CNN. In particular, we show that shallow neural networks can achieve the minimax optimal rates for learning H\"older functions, which complements recent results for deep neural networks. It is also proven that over-parameterized (deep or shallow) neural networks can achieve nearly optimal rates for nonparametric regression.

研究了一些与浅层ReLU$^k$神经网络相对应的变分空间的近似容量，证明了这些空间包含充分平滑的函数与有限变化范数。此外，还建立了以变化范数为基础的逼近率与神经元数量的最佳逼近率，并且证明了浅层ReLU$^k$神经网络可以实现学习H"older函数的极小极值速率，而过参量化(深或浅)神经网络可以实现非参数回归的几乎最优速率。

浅层ReLU$^k$神经网络的最优逼近速率及其在非参数回归中的应用