- Learning involves acquiring general concepts from specific training examples. Example: People continually learn general concepts or categories such as “bird,” “car,” “situations in which I should study more in order to pass the exam,” etc.
- Each such concept can be viewed as describing some subset of objects or events defined over a larger set
- Alternatively, each concept can be thought of as a Boolean-valued function defined over this larger set. (Example: A function defined over all animals, whose value is true for birds and false for other animals).
Definition: Concept learning – Inferring a Boolean-valued function from training examples of its input and output CONCEPT LEARNING AS SEARCH
- Concept learning can be viewed as the task of searching through a large space of hypotheses implicitly defined by the hypothesis representation.
- The goal of this search is to find the hypothesis that best fits the training examples