  Complex structures are typical in machine learning. Tailoring learning
algorithms for every structure requires an effort that may be saved by defining
a generic learning procedure adaptive to any complex structure. In this paper,
we propose to map any complex structure onto a generic form, called
serialization, over which we can apply any sequence-based density estimator. We
then show how to transfer the learned density back onto the space of original
structures. To expose the learning procedure to the structural particularities
of the original structures, we take care that the serializations reflect
accurately the structures' properties. Enumerating all serializations is
infeasible. We propose an effective way to sample representative serializations
from the complete set of serializations which preserves the statistics of the
complete set. Our method is competitive or better than state of the art
learning algorithms that have been specifically designed for given structures.
In addition, since the serialization involves sampling from a combinatorial
process it provides considerable protection from overfitting, which we clearly
demonstrate on a number of experiments.
