Learning Halfspaces Under Log-Concave Densities: Polynomial Approximations and Moment Matching

author: Raghu Meka, School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Amsterdam
published: Aug. 9, 2013,   recorded: June 2013,   views: 3098
Categories

Slides

Related content

Report a problem or upload files

If you have found a problem with this lecture or would like to send us extra material, articles, exercises, etc., please use our ticket system to describe your request and upload the data.
Enter your e-mail into the 'Cc' field, and we will keep you updated with your request's status.
Lecture popularity: You need to login to cast your vote.
  Delicious Bibliography

Description

We give the first polynomial-time algorithm for agnostically learning any function of a constant number of halfspaces with respect to any log-concave distribution (for any constant accuracy parameter). This result was not known even for the case of PAC learning the intersection of two halfspaces. We give two very different proofs of this result. The first develops a theory of polynomial approximation for log-concave measures and constructs a low-degree L1 polynomial approximator for sufficiently smooth functions. The second uses techniques related to the classical moment problem to obtain sandwiching polynomials. Both approaches deviate significantly from known Fourier-based methods, where essentially all previous work required the underlying distribution to have some product structure. Additionally, we show that in the smoothed-analysis setting, the above results hold with respect to distributions that have sub-exponential tails, a property satisfied by many natural and well-studied distributions in machine learning.

See Also:

Download slides icon Download slides: colt2013_meka_matching_01.pdf (2.4 MB)


Help icon Streaming Video Help

Link this page

Would you like to put a link to this lecture on your homepage?
Go ahead! Copy the HTML snippet !

Write your own review or comment:

make sure you have javascript enabled or clear this field: