  The so-called pinball loss for estimating conditional quantiles is a
well-known tool in both statistics and machine learning. So far, however, only
little work has been done to quantify the efficiency of this tool for
nonparametric approaches. We fill this gap by establishing inequalities that
describe how close approximate pinball risk minimizers are to the corresponding
conditional quantile. These inequalities, which hold under mild assumptions on
the data-generating distribution, are then used to establish so-called variance
bounds, which recently turned out to play an important role in the statistical
analysis of (regularized) empirical risk minimization approaches. Finally, we
use both types of inequalities to establish an oracle inequality for support
vector machines that use the pinball loss. The resulting learning rates are
min--max optimal under some standard regularity assumptions on the conditional
quantile.
