Testing Distributional Assumptions of Learning Algorithms

There are many important high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when strong assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be sufficiently confident that the data indeed satisfies the distributional assumption, so that one can trust in the output quality of the agnostic learning algorithm? We propose a model by which to systematically study the design of tester-learner pairs ( A , T ), such that if the distribution on examples in the data passes the tester T then one can safely trust the output of the agnostic learner A on the data.

Authors

• Ronitt Rubinfeld
• Arsen Vasilyan

Keywords

• distribution testing
• agnostic learning
• learning theory