Related papers: Tight Bounds on $\ell_1$ Approximation and Learnin…
Submodular and fractionally subadditive (or equivalently XOS) functions play a fundamental role in combinatorial optimization, algorithmic game theory and machine learning. Motivated by learnability of these classes of functions from random…
We investigate the approximability of several classes of real-valued functions by functions of a small number of variables ({\em juntas}). Our main results are tight bounds on the number of variables required to approximate a function…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function f is the least degree of a real polynomial that approximates f pointwise to error at most 1/3. Approximate degree is known to be a lower bound on quantum query complexity. We resolve or nearly…
We study correlation bounds under pairwise independent distributions for functions with no large Fourier coefficients. Functions in which all Fourier coefficients are bounded by $\delta$ are called $\delta$-{\em uniform}. The search for…
We give tight bounds on the degree $\ell$ homogenous parts $f_\ell$ of a bounded function $f$ on the cube. We show that if $f: \{\pm 1\}^n \rightarrow [-1,1]$ has degree $d$, then $\| f_\ell \|_\infty$ is bounded by $d^\ell/\ell!$, and $\|…
We study the complexity of approximate representation and learning of submodular functions over the uniform distribution on the Boolean hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$. Our main result is the following structural theorem: any submodular function is…
We prove two main results on how arbitrary linear threshold functions $f(x) = \sign(w\cdot x - \theta)$ over the $n$-dimensional Boolean hypercube can be approximated by simple threshold functions. Our first result shows that every…
This paper considers the problem of approximating a Boolean function $f$ using another Boolean function from a specified class. Two classes of approximating functions are considered: $k$-juntas, and linear Boolean functions. The $n$ input…
We show that for any constant $\epsilon > 0$ and $p \ge 1$, it is possible to distinguish functions $f : \{0,1\}^n \to [0,1]$ that are submodular from those that are $\epsilon$-far from every submodular function in $\ell_p$ distance with a…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f(x_{1},x_{2},\ldots,x_{n})$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise within $1/3$. Upper bounds on approximate degree have a variety of applications in…
We study closure properties for the Littlestone and threshold dimensions of binary hypothesis classes. Given classes $\mathcal{H}_1, \ldots, \mathcal{H}_k$ of Boolean functions with bounded Littlestone (respectively, threshold) dimension,…
Gaussian bounds on noise correlation of functions play an important role in hardness of approximation, in quantitative social choice theory and in testing. The author (2008) obtained sharp gaussian bounds for the expected correlation of…
In this paper we study the approximate learnability of valuations commonly used throughout economics and game theory for the quantitative encoding of agent preferences. We provide upper and lower bounds regarding the learnability of…
The problem of learning threshold functions is a fundamental one in machine learning. Classical learning theory implies sample complexity of $O(\xi^{-1} \log(1/\beta))$ (for generalization error $\xi$ with confidence $1-\beta$). The private…
The central purpose of the present paper is to study boundary behavior of squeezing functions on bounded domains. We prove that the squeezing function of a strongly pseudoconvex domain tends to 1 near the boundary. In fact, such an estimate…
It is shown that functions defined on $\{0,1,...,r-1\}^n$ satisfying certain conditions of bounded differences that guarantee sub-Gaussian tail behavior also satisfy a much stronger ``local'' sub-Gaussian property. For self-bounding and…
We study how well functions over the boolean hypercube of the form $f_k(x)=(|x|-k)(|x|-k-1)$ can be approximated by sums of squares of low-degree polynomials, obtaining good bounds for the case of approximation in $\ell_{\infty}$-norm as…
We give the first non-trivial upper bounds on the average sensitivity and noise sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. More specifically, for a Boolean function f on n variables equal to the sign of a real, multivariate polynomial…
A new non-linear variant of a quantitative extension of the uniform boundedness principle is used to show sharpness of error bounds for univariate approximation by sums of sigmoid and ReLU functions. Single hidden layer feedforward neural…
Let $T_{\epsilon}$ be the noise operator acting on functions on the boolean cube $\{0,1\}^n$. Let $f$ be a nonnegative function on $\{0,1\}^n$ and let $q \ge 1$. We upper bound the $\ell_q$ norm of $T_{\epsilon} f$ by the average $\ell_q$…