Abstract
This paper is concerned with the problem of supervised learning of deterministic finite state automata, in the technical sense of identification in the limit from complete data, by finding a minimal DFA consistent with the data (regular inference).
We solve this problem by translating it in its entirety to a vertex coloring problem. Essentially, such a problem consists of two types of constraints that restrict the hypothesis space: inequality and equality constraints.
Inequality constraints translate to the vertex coloring problem in a very natural way. Equality constraints however greatly complicate the translation to vertex coloring. In previous coloring-based translations, these were therefore encoded either dynamically by modifying the vertex coloring instance on-the-fly, or by encoding them as satisfiability problems. We provide the first translation that encodes both types of constraints together in a pure vertex coloring instance. This offers many opportunities for applying insights from combinatorial optimization and graph theory to regular inference. We immediately obtain new complexity bounds, as well as a family of new learning algorithms which can be used to obtain both exact hypotheses, as well as fast approximations.
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Costa Florêncio, C., Verwer, S. (2012). Regular Inference as Vertex Coloring. In: Bshouty, N.H., Stoltz, G., Vayatis, N., Zeugmann, T. (eds) Algorithmic Learning Theory. ALT 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7568. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34106-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34106-9_10
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