Learning Concepts Definable in First-Order Logic with Counting

Abstract

We study Boolean classification problems over relational background structures in the logical framework introduced by Grohe and Turán (TOCS 2004). It is known (Grohe and Ritzert, LICS 2017) that classifiers definable in first-order logic over structures of polylogarithmic degree can be learned in sublinear time, where the degree of the structure and the running time are measured in terms of the size of the structure. We generalise the results to the first-order logic with counting FOCN, which was introduced by Kuske and Schweikardt (LICS 2017) as an expressive logic generalising various other counting logics. Specifically, we prove that classifiers definable in FOCN over classes of structures of polylogarithmic degree can be consistently learned in sublinear time. This can be seen as a first step towards extending the learning framework to include numerical aspects of machine learning. We extend the result to agnostic probably approximately correct (PAC) learning for classes of structures of degree at most $(\log \log n)^c$ for some constant $c$. Moreover, we show that bounding the degree is crucial to obtain sublinear-time learning algorithms. That is, we prove that, for structures of unbounded degree, learning is not possible in sublinear time, even for classifiers definable in plain first-order logic.