So far in the book we have studied the statistical perspective of learning, namely, how many samples are needed for learning. In other words, we focused on the amount of information learning requires. However, when considering automated learning, computational resources also play a major role in determining the complexity of a task: that is, how much computation is involved in carrying out a learning task. Once a sufficient training sample is available to the learner, there is some computation to be done to extract a hypothesis or figure out the label of a given test instance. These computational resources are crucial in any practical application of machine learning. We refer to these two types of resources as the sample complexity and the computational complexity. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the computational complexity of learning.

The computational complexity of learning should be viewed in the wider context of the computational complexity of general algorithmic tasks. This area has been extensively investigated; see, for example, (Sipser 2006). The introductory comments that follow summarize the basic ideas of that general theory that are most relevant to our discussion.

The actual runtime (in seconds) of an algorithm depends on the specific machine the algorithm is being implemented on (e.g., what the clock rate of the machine's CPU is). To avoid dependence on the specific machine, it is common to analyze the runtime of algorithms in an asymptotic sense.

Clustering is one of the most widely used techniques for exploratory data analysis. Across all disciplines, from social sciences to biology to computer science, people try to get a first intuition about their data by identifying meaningful groups among the data points. For example, computational biologists cluster genes on the basis of similarities in their expression in different experiments; retailers cluster customers, on the basis of their customer profiles, for the purpose of targeted marketing; and astronomers cluster stars on the basis of their spacial proximity.

The first point that one should clarify is, naturally, what is clustering? Intuitively, clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects such that similar objects end up in the same group and dissimilar objects are separated into different groups. Clearly, this description is quite imprecise and possibly ambiguous. Quite surprisingly, it is not at all clear how to come up with a more rigorous definition.

There are several sources for this difficulty. One basic problem is that the two objectives mentioned in the earlier statement may in many cases contradict each other. Mathematically speaking, similarity (or proximity) is not a transitive relation, while cluster sharing is an equivalence relation and, in particular, it is a transitive relation. More concretely, it may be the case that there is a long sequence of objects, x1, …, xm such that each xi is very similar to its two neighbors, xi−1 and xi+1, but x1 and xm are very dissimilar.

An artificial neural network is a model of computation inspired by the structure of neural networks in the brain. In simplified models of the brain, it consists of a large number of basic computing devices (neurons) that are connected to each other in a complex communication network, through which the brain is able to carry out highly complex computations. Artificial neural networks are formal computation constructs that are modeled after this computation paradigm.

Learning with neural networks was proposed in the mid-20th century. It yields an effective learning paradigm and has recently been shown to achieve cutting-edge performance on several learning tasks.

A neural network can be described as a directed graph whose nodes correspond to neurons and edges correspond to links between them. Each neuron receives as input a weighted sum of the outputs of the neurons connected to its incoming edges. We focus on feedforward networks in which the underlying graph does not contain cycles.

In the context of learning, we can define a hypothesis class consisting of neural network predictors, where all the hypotheses share the underlying graph structure of the network and differ in the weights over edges. As we will show in Section 20.3, every predictor over n variables that can be implemented in time T(n) can also be expressed as a neural network predictor of size O(T(n)2), where the size of the network is the number of nodes in it.

We started this book with a distribution free learning framework; namely, we did not impose any assumptions on the underlying distribution over the data. Furthermore, we followed a discriminative approach in which our goal is not to learn the underlying distribution but rather to learn an accurate predictor. In this chapter we describe a generative approach, in which it is assumed that the underlying distribution over the data has a specific parametric form and our goal is to estimate the parameters of the model. This task is called parametric density estimation.

The discriminative approach has the advantage of directly optimizing the quantity of interest (the prediction accuracy) instead of learning the underlying distribution. This was phrased as follows by Vladimir Vapnik in his principle for solving problems using a restricted amount of information:

When solving a given problem, try to avoid a more general problem as an intermediate step.

Of course, if we succeed in learning the underlying distribution accurately, we are considered to be “experts” in the sense that we can predict by using the Bayes optimal classifier. The problem is that it is usually more difficult to learn the underlying distribution than to learn an accurate predictor. However, in some situations, it is reasonable to adopt the generative learning approach. For example, sometimes it is easier (computationally) to estimate the parameters of the model than to learn a discriminative predictor.

In this chapter we describe a different model of learning, which is called online learning. Previously, we studied the PAC learning model, in which the learner first receives a batch of training examples, uses the training set to learn a hypothesis, and only when learning is completed uses the learned hypothesis for predicting the label of new examples. In our papayas learning problem, this means that we should first buy a bunch of papayas and taste them all. Then, we use all of this information to learn a prediction rule that determines the taste of new papayas. In contrast, in online learning there is no separation between a training phase and a prediction phase. Instead, each time we buy a papaya, it is first considered a test example since we should predict whether it is going to taste good. Then, after taking a bite from the papaya, we know the true label, and the same papaya can be used as a training example that can help us improve our prediction mechanism for future papayas.

Concretely, online learning takes place in a sequence of consecutive rounds. On each online round, the learner first receives an instance (the learner buys a papaya and knows its shape and color, which form the instance). Then, the learner is required to predict a label (is the papaya tasty?). At the end of the round, the learner obtains the correct label (he tastes the papaya and then knows whether it is tasty or not).