A theoretical framework for learning from a pool of disparate data sources
Many enterprises incorporate information gathered from a variety of data sources into an integrated input for some learning task. For example, aiming towards the design of an automated diagnostic tool for some disease, one may wish to integrate data gathered in many different hospitals. A major obstacle to such endeavors is that different data sources may vary considerably in the way they choose to represent related data. In practice, the problem is usually solved by a manual construction of semantic mappings and translations between the different sources. Recently there have been attempts to introduce automated algorithms based on machine learning tools for the construction of such translations.In this work we propose a theoretical framework for making classification predictions from a collection of different data sources, without creating explicit translations between them. Our framework allows a precise mathematical analysis of the complexity of such tasks, and it provides a tool for the development and comparison of different learning algorithms. Our main objective, at this stage, is to demonstrate the usefulness of computational learning theory to this practically important area and to stimulate further theoretical and experimental research of questions related to this framework.