Statistical queries and faulty PAC oracles
Scott E. Decatur · 1993
In this paper we study learning in the PAC model of Valiant [18] in which the example oracle used for learning may be faulty in one of two ways: either by misclassifying the example or by distorting the distribution of examples. We first consider models in which examples are misclassified. Kearns [12] recently showed that efficient learning in a new model using statistical queries is a sufficient condition for PAC learning with classification noise. We show that efficient learning with statistical queries is sufficient for learning in the PAC model with malicious error rate proportional to the required statistical query accuracy. One application of this result is a new lower bound for tolerable malicious error in learning monomials of k literals. This is the first such bound which is independent of the number of irrelevant attributes n. We also use the statistical query model to give sufficient conditions for using distribution specific algorithms on distributions outside their prescr...