Abstract

A new view of learning is presented. The basis of this view is a natural notion of reduction. We prove completeness and relative difficulty results. An infinite hierarchy of intrinsically more and more difficult to learn concepts is presented. Our results indicate that the complexity notion captured by our new notion of reduction differs dramatically from the traditional studies of the complexity of the algorithms performing learning tasks. 2 1 Introduction Traditional studies of inductive inference have focused on illuminating various strata of learnability based on varying the definition of learnability. The research following the Valiant's PAC model [Val84] and Angluin's teacher/learner model [Ang88] paid very careful attention to calculating the complexity of the learning algorithm. We present a new view of learning, based on the notion of reduction, that captures a different perspective on learning complexity than all prior studies. Based on our prelimanary reports, Jain...

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