On the Hardness of Learning Acyclic Conjunctive Queries

A conjunctive query problem in relational database theory is a problem to determine whether or not a tuple belongs to the answer of a conjunctive query over a database. Here, a tuple and a conjunctive query are regarded as a ground atom and a nonrecursive function-free definite clause, respectively. While the conjunctive query problem is NP-complete in general, it becomes efficiently solvable if a conjunctive query is acyclic. Concerned with this problem, we investigate the learnability of acyclic conjunctive queries from an instance with a j-database which is a finite set of ground unit clauses containing at most j-ary predicate symbols. We deal with two kinds of instances, a simple instance as a set of ground atoms and an extended instance as a set of pairs of a ground atom and a description. Then, we show that, for each j ≥ 3, there exist a j-database such that acyclic conjunctive queries are not polynomially predictable from an extended instance under the cryptographic assumpti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ALT
• Authors: Kouichi Hirata
• Keywords: Acyclic Conjunctive Queries, ALT 2000, Conjunctive Query, Conjunctive Query Problem, Machine Learning