Tom F. Sterkenburg

Tom F. Sterkenburg

Statistical learning theory is often associated with the principle of Occam's razor, which recommends a simplicity preference in inductive inference. This paper distills the core argument for simplicity obtainable from statistical learning theory, built on the theory's central learning guarantee for the method of empirical risk minimization. This core "means-ends" argument is that a simpler hypothesis class or inductive model is better because it has better learning guarantees; however, these guarantees are model-relative and so the theoretical push towards simplicity is checked by our prior knowledge.

Tom F. Sterkenburg

We study computable PAC (CPAC) learning as introduced by Agarwal et al. (2020). First, we consider the main open question of finding characterizations of proper and improper CPAC learning. We give a characterization of a closely related notion of strong CPAC learning, and provide a negative answer to the COLT open problem posed by Agarwal et al. (2021) whether all decidably representable VC classes are improperly CPAC learnable. Second, we consider undecidability of (computable) PAC learnability. We give a simple general argument to exhibit such ndecidability, and initiate a study of the arithmetical complexity of learnability. We briefly discuss the relation to the undecidability result of Ben-David et al. (2019), that motivated the work of Agarwal et al.

Tom F. Sterkenburg, Peter D. Grünwald

The no-free-lunch theorems promote a skeptical conclusion that all possible machine learning algorithms equally lack justification. But how could this leave room for a learning theory, that shows that some algorithms are better than others? Drawing parallels to the philosophy of induction, we point out that the no-free-lunch results presuppose a conception of learning algorithms as purely data-driven. On this conception, every algorithm must have an inherent inductive bias, that wants justification. We argue that many standard learning algorithms should rather be understood as model-dependent: in each application they also require for input a model, representing a bias. Generic algorithms themselves, they can be given a model-relative justification.