The DNA promoter sequences domain theory and database have become popular for
testing systems that integrate empirical and analytical learning. This note
reports a simple change and reinterpretation of the domain theory in terms of
M-of-N concepts, involving no learning, that results in an accuracy of 93.4% on
the 106 items of the database. Moreover, an exhaustive search of the space of
M-of-N domain theory interpretations indicates that the expected accuracy of a
randomly chosen interpretation is 76.5%, and that a maximum accuracy of 97.2%
is achieved in 12 cases. This demonstrates the informativeness of the domain
theory, without the complications of understanding the interactions between
various learning algorithms and the theory. In addition, our results help
characterize the difficulty of learning using the DNA promoters theory.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file