Labeled Compression Schemes for Extremal Classes

It is a long-standing open problem whether there exists a compression scheme whose size is of the order of the Vapnik-Chervonienkis (VC) dimension d. Recently compression schemes of size exponential in d have been found for any concept class of VC dimension d. Previously, compression schemes of size d have been given for maximum classes, which are special concept classes whose size equals an upper bound due to Sauer-Shelah. We consider a generalization of maximum classes called extremal classes. Their definition is based on a powerful generalization of the Sauer-Shelah bound called the Sandwich Theorem, which has been studied in several areas of combinatorics and computer science. The key result of the paper is a construction of a sample compression scheme for extremal classes of size equal to their VC dimension. We also give a number of open problems concerning the combinatorial structure of extremal classes and the existence of unlabeled compression schemes for them.