On Learning in the Presence of Unspecified Attribute Values (Extended Abstract)

) Nader H. Bshouty David K. Wilson Department of Computer Science University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 Email: fbshouty, [email protected] Abstract We continue the study of learning in the presence of unspecified attribute values (UAV) where some of the attributes of the examples may be unspecified [9, 4]. A UAV assignment x 2 f0; 1; ?g n , where ? indicates unspecified, is classified positive (negative) with respect to a Boolean function f if all possible assignments for the unspecified attributes result in a positive (negative) classification. Otherwise, the classification of x is ?. Given an example x 2 f0; 1; ?g n , the oracle UAV-MQ(x) responds with the classification of x with respect to the unknown target. Given a hypothesis h, the oracle UAV-EQ returns an example x 2 f0; 1; ?g n for which h(x) is incorrect, if such an example exists. The new contributions of this paper are as follows. First we define a new oracle called the ..