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How Many Strings Are Easy to Predict?

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Learning Theory and Kernel Machines

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2777))

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Abstract

It is well known in the theory of Kolmogorov complexity that most strings cannot be compressed; more precisely, only exponentially few (Θ(2n − m)) strings of length n can be compressed by m bits. This paper extends the ‘incompressibility’ property of Kolmogorov complexity to the ‘unpredictability’ property of predictive complexity. The ‘unpredictability’ property states that predictive complexity (defined as the loss suffered by a universal prediction algorithm working infinitely long) of most strings is close to a trivial upper bound (the loss suffered by a trivial minimax constant prediction strategy). We show that only exponentially few strings can be successfully predicted and find the base of the exponent.

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kalnishkan, Y., Vovk, V., Vyugin, M.V. (2003). How Many Strings Are Easy to Predict?. In: Schölkopf, B., Warmuth, M.K. (eds) Learning Theory and Kernel Machines. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2777. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45167-9_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45167-9_38

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-40720-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45167-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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