NeuroCOLT

Neural Networks and Computational Learning Theory

 

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NeuroCOLT Technical Report NC-TR-95-043

On-line Learning with Malicious Noise and the Closure Algorithm

Peter Auer
IGI, Graz University of Technology

Nicoḷ Cesa-Bianchi
DSI, University of Milan

Abstract
We investigate a variant of the on-line learning model for classes of $\Bool$-valued functions (concepts) in which the labels of a certain amount of the input instances are corrupted by adversarial noise. We propose an extension of a general learning strategy, known as ``Closure Algorithm'', to this noise model, and show a worst-case mistake bound of $m + (d+1)K$ for learning an arbitrary intersection-closed concept class $\scC$, where $K$ is the number of noisy labels, $d$ is a combinatorial parameter measuring $\scC$'s complexity, and $m$ is the worst-case mistake bound of the Closure Algorithm for learning $\scC$ in the noise-free model. For several concept classes our extended Closure Algorithm is efficient and can tolerate a noise rate up to the information-theoretic upper bound. Finally, we show how to efficiently turn any algorithm for the on-line noise model into a learning algorithm for the PAC model with malicious noise.

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