In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.

[Q]: Polynomial approximations to boolean functions have led to many positive results in computer science. In particular, polynomial approximations to the sign function underly algorithms for agnostically learning halfspaces, as well as pseudorandom generators for halfspaces. In this work, we investigate the limits of these techniques by proving inapproximability results for the sign function. Firstly, the “polynomial regression” algorithm of Kalai et al. (SIAM J. Comput. 2008) shows that halfspaces can be learned with respect to log-concave distributions on Rn in the challenging agnostic learning model. The power of this algorithm relies on the fact that under log-concave distributions, halfspaces can be approximated arbitrarily well by low-degree polynomials. We ask whether this technique can be extended beyond log-concave distributions, and establish a negative result. We show that polynomials of any degree cannot approximate the sign function to within arbitrarily low error for a large class of non-log-concave distributions on the real line, including those with densities proportional to exp(−|x|0.99). This impossibility result extends to multivariate distributions, and thus gives a strong limitation on the power of the polynomial regression algorithm for halfspaces. Secondly, we investigate the derandomization of Chernoff-type concentration inequalities. Chernoff-type tail bounds on sums of independent random variables have pervasive applications in theoretical computer science. Schmidt et al. (SIAM J. Discrete Math. 1995) showed that these inequalities can be established for sums of random variables with only O(log(1/δ))-wise independence, for a tail probability of δ. We show that their results are tight up to constant factors. These results rely on techniques from weighted approximation theory, which studies how well functions on the real line can be approximated by polynomials under various distributions. We believe that these techniques will have further applications in other areas of theoretical computer science. Harvard University, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Supported by an NDSEG Fellowship and NSF grant CNS-1237235. Harvard University, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Supported by NSF grant CCF-1116616 and the Lord Rutherford Memorial Research Fellowship.
[A]: Weighted Polynomial Approximations: Limits for Learning and Pseudorandomness


[Q]: In many applications data is naturally presented in terms of orderings of some basic elements or symbols. Reasoning about such data requires a notion of similarity capable of handling sequences of different lengths. In this paper we describe a family of Mercer kernel functions for such sequentially structured data. The family is characterized by a decomposable structure in terms of symbol-level and structure-level similarities, representing a specific combination of kernels which allows for efficient computation. We provide an experimental evaluation on sequential classification tasks comparing kernels from our family of kernels to a state of the art sequence kernel called the Global Alignment kernel which has been shown to outperform Dynamic Time Warping.
[A]: On a Family of Decomposable Kernels on Sequences On a Family of Decomposable Kernels on Sequences


[Q]: Although a number of related algorithms have been developed to evaluate influence diagrams, exploiting the conditional independence in the diagram, the exact solution has remained intractable for many important problems. In this paper we introduce decision circuits as a means to exploit the local structure usually found in decision problems and to improve the performance of influence diagram analysis. This work builds on the probabilistic inference algorithms using arithmetic circuits to represent Bayesian belief networks [Darwiche, 2003]. Once compiled, these arithmetic circuits efficiently evaluate probabilistic queries on the belief network, and methods have been developed to exploit both the global and local structure of the network. We show that decision circuits can be constructed in a similar fashion and promise similar benefits.
[A]:
Evaluating influence diagrams with decision circuits