Computational Learning Theory
Agnostic PAC-Learning of Functions on Analog Neural Nets
Abstract: There exist a number of negative results ([J), [BR), [KV]) about learning on neural nets in Valiant's model [V) for probably approximately correctlearning ("PAClearning"). These negative results are based on an asymptotic analysis where one lets the number of nodes in the neural net go to infinit.y. Hence this analysis is less adequate forthe investigation of learning on a small fixed neural net.
Substructure Discovery Using Minimum Description Length and Background Knowledge
The ability to identify interesting and repetitive substructures is an essential component to discovering knowledge in structural data. We describe a new version of our SUBDUE substructure discovery system based on the minimum description length principle. The SUBDUE system discovers substructures that compress the original data and represent structural concepts in the data. By replacing previously-discovered substructures in the data, multiple passes of SUBDUE produce a hierarchical description of the structural regularities in the data. SUBDUE uses a computationally-bounded inexact graph match that identifies similar, but not identical, instances of a substructure and finds an approximate measure of closeness of two substructures when under computational constraints. In addition to the minimum description length principle, other background knowledge can be used by SUBDUE to guide the search towards more appropriate substructures. Experiments in a variety of domains demonstrate SUBDUE's ability to find substructures capable of compressing the original data and to discover structural concepts important to the domain. Description of Online Appendix: This is a compressed tar file containing the SUBDUE discovery system, written in C. The program accepts as input databases represented in graph form, and will output discovered substructures with their corresponding value.
Information, Prediction, and Query by Committee
Freund, Yoav, Seung, H. Sebastian, Shamir, Eli, Tishby, Naftali
We analyze the "query by committee" algorithm, a method for filtering informativequeries from a random stream of inputs. We show that if the two-member committee algorithm achieves information gainwith positive lower bound, then the prediction error decreases exponentially with the number of queries. We show that, in particular, this exponential decrease holds for query learning of thresholded smooth functions.