A NECESSARY CONDITION FOR LEARNING FROM POSITIVE EXAMPLES

We present a simple combinatorial criterion for determining concept classes that cannot be learned in the sense of Valiant from a polynomial number of positive-only examples. The criterion is applied to several types of Boolean formulae in conjunctive and disjunctive normal form, to the majority function, to graphs with large connected components, and to a neural network with a single threshold unit. All are shown to be nonlearnable from positive-only examples. © 1990, Kluwer Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.