Learning convex polytopes with margin

Lee-Ad Gottlieb, Eran Kaufman, Aryeh Kontorovich, Gabriel Nivasch

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018)

We present improved algorithm for properly learning convex polytopes in the realizable PAC setting from data with a margin. Our learning algorithm constructs a consistent polytope as an intersection of about t log t halfspaces with margins in time polynomial in t (where t is the number of halfspaces forming an optimal polytope). We also identify distinct generalizations of the notion of margin from hyperplanes to polytopes and investigate how they relate geometrically; this result may be of interest beyond the learning setting.