2013/07/13 by Varun Kanade, Kanade, Varun, Elchanan Mossel +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Bayesian Methods and Mixture Models #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Machine Learning and Algorithms #Neural Networks and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1307.3617
openalex publication_date 2013/07/13 · openalex created_date 2024/04/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The theory of learning under the uniform distribution is rich and deep, with connections to cryptography, computational complexity, and the analysis of boolean functions to name a few areas. This theory however is very limited due to the fact that the uniform distribution and the corresponding Fourier basis are rarely encountered as a statistical model. A family of distributions that vastly generalizes the uniform distribution on the Boolean cube is that of distributions represented by Markov Random Fields (MRF). Markov Random Fields are one of the main tools for modeling high dimensional data in many areas of statistics and machine learning. In this paper we initiate the investigation of extending central ideas, methods and algorithms from the theory of learning under the uniform distribution to the setup of learning concepts given examples from MRF distributions. In particular, our results establish a novel connection between properties of MCMC sampling of MRFs and learning under the MRF distribution.