On the equivalence of Occam algorithms

Abstract

Blumer et al. (1987, 1989) showed that any concept class that is learnable by Occam algorithms is PAC learnable. Board and Pitt (1990) showed a partial converse of this theorem: for concept classes that are closed under exception lists, any class that is PAC learnable is learnable by an Occam algorithm. However, their Occam algorithm outputs a hypothesis whose complexity is $\delta$-dependent, which is an important limitation. In this paper, we show that their partial converse applies to Occam algorithms with $\delta$-independent complexities as well. Thus, we provide a posteriori justification of various theoretical results and algorithm design methods which use the partial converse as a basis for their work.