On the Complexity of Teaching

Authors

Sally A. Goldman, Washington University in St Louis
Michael J. Kearns, AT&T Bell Laboratories

Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

1992-08-11

Filename

WUCS-92-28.pdf

Technical Report Number

WUCS-92-28

Abstract

While most theoretical work in machine learning has focused on the complexity of learning, recently there has been increasing interest in formally studying the complexity of teaching. In this paper we study the complexity of teaching by considering a variant of the on-line learning model in which a helpful teacher selects the instances. We measure the complexity of teaching a concept from a given concept class by a combinatorial measure we call the teaching dimension. Informally, the teaching dimension of a concept class is the minimum number of instances a teacher must reveal to uniquely identify an target concept chosen from the class.

Comments

Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7WW7G0Q

Recommended Citation

Goldman, Sally A. and Kearns, Michael J., "On the Complexity of Teaching" Report Number: WUCS-92-28 (1992). All Computer Science and Engineering Research.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cse_research/591