Synonyms
Definition
The term concept learning is originated in psychology, where it refers to the human ability to learn categories for object and to recognize new instances of those categories. In machine learning, concept is more formally defined as “inferring a boolean-valued function from training examples of its inputs and outputs” (Mitchell, 1997).
Background
Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1956) published their book A Study of Thinking, which became a landmark in psychology and would later have a major impact on machine learning. The experiments reported by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin were directed toward understanding a human’s ability to categorize and how categories are learned.
We begin with what seems a paradox. The world of experience of any normal man is composed of a tremendous array of discriminably different objects, events, people, impressions…But were we to utilize fully our capacity for registering the differences in things and...
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Recommended Reading
Banerji, R. B. (1960). An information processing program for object recognition. General Systems, 5, 117–127.
Banerji, R. B. (1962). The description list of concepts. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 5(8), 426–432.
Banerji, R. B. (1964). A Language for the Description of Concepts. General Systems, 9, 135–141.
Banerji, R. B. (1980). Artificial intelligence: A theoretical approach. New York: North Holland.
Breiman, L., Friedman, J. H., Olshen, R. A., & Stone, C. J. (1984). Classification and regression trees. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Bruner, J. S., Goodnow, J. J., & Austin, G. A. (1956). A study of thinking. New York: Wiley.
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Sammut, C. A., & Banerji, R. B. (1986). Learning concepts by asking questions. In R. S. Michalski, J. G. Carbonell, & T. M. Mitchell (Eds.), Machine learning: An artificial intelligence approach (Vol. 2, pp. 167–192). Los Altos, CA: Morgan-Kaufmann.
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Sammut, C. (2011). Concept Learning. In: Sammut, C., Webb, G.I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Machine Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30164-8_154
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30164-8_154
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