NeuroCOLT

Neural Networks and Computational Learning Theory

 

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NeuroCOLT Technical Report NC-TR-94-019

Neural Nets with Superlinear VC-Dimension

Wolfgang Maass
Institute for Theoretical Computer Science
Technische Universitaet Graz
Klosterwiesgasse 32/2
A-8010 Graz
Austria

Abstract
It has been known for quite a while that the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension (VC-dimension) of a feedforward neural net with linear threshold gates is at most $O(w \cdot \log w)$, where $w$ is the total number of weights in the neural net. We show in this paper that this bound is in fact asymptotically optimal. More precisely, we exhibit for any depth $d\geq 3$ a large class of feedforward neural nets of depth $d$ with $w$ weights that have VC-dimension $\Omega(w\cdot \log w)$. This lower bound holds even if the inputs are restricted to boolean values. The proof of this result relies on a new method that allows us to encode more ``program-bits'' in the weights of a neural net than previously thought possible.

 

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