255 research outputs found
A Survey of Quantum Learning Theory
This paper surveys quantum learning theory: the theoretical aspects of
machine learning using quantum computers. We describe the main results known
for three models of learning: exact learning from membership queries, and
Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) and agnostic learning from classical or
quantum examples.Comment: 26 pages LaTeX. v2: many small changes to improve the presentation.
This version will appear as Complexity Theory Column in SIGACT News in June
2017. v3: fixed a small ambiguity in the definition of gamma(C) and updated a
referenc
Quantum Algorithms for Learning and Testing Juntas
In this article we develop quantum algorithms for learning and testing
juntas, i.e. Boolean functions which depend only on an unknown set of k out of
n input variables. Our aim is to develop efficient algorithms:
- whose sample complexity has no dependence on n, the dimension of the domain
the Boolean functions are defined over;
- with no access to any classical or quantum membership ("black-box")
queries. Instead, our algorithms use only classical examples generated
uniformly at random and fixed quantum superpositions of such classical
examples;
- which require only a few quantum examples but possibly many classical
random examples (which are considered quite "cheap" relative to quantum
examples).
Our quantum algorithms are based on a subroutine FS which enables sampling
according to the Fourier spectrum of f; the FS subroutine was used in earlier
work of Bshouty and Jackson on quantum learning. Our results are as follows:
- We give an algorithm for testing k-juntas to accuracy that uses
quantum examples. This improves on the number of examples used
by the best known classical algorithm.
- We establish the following lower bound: any FS-based k-junta testing
algorithm requires queries.
- We give an algorithm for learning -juntas to accuracy that
uses quantum examples and
random examples. We show that this learning algorithms is close to optimal by
giving a related lower bound.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure. Uses synttree package. To appear in Quantum
Information Processin
Two new results about quantum exact learning
We present two new results about exact learning by quantum computers. First,
we show how to exactly learn a -Fourier-sparse -bit Boolean function from
uniform quantum examples for that function. This
improves over the bound of uniformly random classical
examples (Haviv and Regev, CCC'15). Our main tool is an improvement of Chang's
lemma for the special case of sparse functions. Second, we show that if a
concept class can be exactly learned using quantum membership
queries, then it can also be learned using classical membership queries. This improves the
previous-best simulation result (Servedio and Gortler, SICOMP'04) by a -factor.Comment: v3: 21 pages. Small corrections and clarification
Top-Down Induction of Decision Trees: Rigorous Guarantees and Inherent Limitations
Consider the following heuristic for building a decision tree for a function
. Place the most influential variable of
at the root, and recurse on the subfunctions and on the
left and right subtrees respectively; terminate once the tree is an
-approximation of . We analyze the quality of this heuristic,
obtaining near-matching upper and lower bounds:
Upper bound: For every with decision tree size and every
, this heuristic builds a decision tree of size
at most .
Lower bound: For every and , there is an with decision tree size such that
this heuristic builds a decision tree of size .
We also obtain upper and lower bounds for monotone functions:
and
respectively. The lower bound disproves conjectures of Fiat and Pechyony (2004)
and Lee (2009).
Our upper bounds yield new algorithms for properly learning decision trees
under the uniform distribution. We show that these algorithms---which are
motivated by widely employed and empirically successful top-down decision tree
learning heuristics such as ID3, C4.5, and CART---achieve provable guarantees
that compare favorably with those of the current fastest algorithm (Ehrenfeucht
and Haussler, 1989). Our lower bounds shed new light on the limitations of
these heuristics.
Finally, we revisit the classic work of Ehrenfeucht and Haussler. We extend
it to give the first uniform-distribution proper learning algorithm that
achieves polynomial sample and memory complexity, while matching its
state-of-the-art quasipolynomial runtime
- …