Learning in the Limit with Adversarial Disturbances

Abstract

We study distribution-dependent, data-dependent, learning in the limit with adversarial disturbance. We consider an optimization-based approach to learning binary classifiers from data under worst-case assumptions on the disturbance. The learning process is modeled as a decision-maker who seeks to minimize generalization error, given access only to possibly maliciously corrupted data. Two models for the nature of the disturbance are considered: disturbance in the labels of a certain fraction of the data, and disturbance that also affects the position of the data points. We provide distributiondependent bounds on the amount of error as a function of the noise level for the two models, and describe the optimal strategy of the decision-maker, as well as the worst-case disturbance.