On Learnability under General Stochastic Processes

05/15/2020

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by   A. Philip Dawid, et al.

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University of Michigan

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University of Cambridge

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12

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Statistical learning theory under independent and identically distributed (iid) sampling and online learning theory for worst case individual sequences are two of the best developed branches of learning theory. Statistical learning under general non-iid stochastic processes is less mature. We provide two natural notions of learnability of a function class under a general stochastic process. We are able to sandwich the first one between iid and online learnability. We show that the second one is in fact equivalent to online learnability. Our results are sharpest in the binary classification setting but we also show that similar results continue to hold in the regression setting.