Efficient PAC Learning for Realizable-Statistic Models via Convex Surrogates

A central question in the theory of machine learning concerns the identification of classes of data distributions for which one can provide computationally efficient learning algorithms with provable statistical learning guarantees. Indeed, in the context of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, there has been much interest in exploring intermediate PAC learning models that, unlike the realizable PAC learning setting, allow for some stochasticity in the labels, and unlike the fully agnostic PAC learning setting, also admit computationally efficient learning algorithms with finite sample complexity bounds. Some examples of such models include random classification noise (RCN), probabilistic concepts, Massart noise, and generalized linear models (GLMs); in general, most of this work has focused on binary classification problems. In this paper, we study what we call realizable-statistic models (RSMs), wherein we allow stochastic labels but assume that some vector-valued statistic of the conditional label distribution comes from some known function class. RSMs are a flexible class of models that interpolate between the realizable and fully agnostic settings, and that also recover several previously studied models as special cases.