Skip to main content

Metalearning

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Machine Learning
  • 225 Accesses

Synonyms

Adaptive learning; Dynamic selection of bias; Learning to learn; Ranking learning methods; self-adaptive systems

Definition

Metalearning allows machine learning systems to benefit from their repetitive application. If a learning system fails to perform efficiently, one would expect the learning mechanism itself to adapt in case the same task is presented again. Metalearning differs from base-learning in the scope of the level of adaptation; whereas learning at the base-level is focused on accumulating experience on a specific task (e.g., credit rating, medical diagnosis, mine-rock discrimination, fraud detection, etc.), learning at the metalevel is concerned with accumulating experience on the performance of multiple applications of a learning system.

Briefly stated, the field of metalearning is focused on the relation between tasks or domains, and learning algorithms. Rather than starting afresh on each new task, metalearning facilitates evaluation and comparison of learning...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Recommended Reading

  • Bernstein, A., Provost, F., & Hill, S. (2005). Toward intelligent assistance for a data mining process: An ontology-based approach for cost-sensitive classification. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 17(4), 503–518.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brazdil, P., Giraud-Carrier, C., Soares, C., & Vilalta, R. (2009). Metalearning – applications to data mining. Berlin: Springer.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Brazdil, P., & Henery, R. (1994). Analysis of results. In D. Michie, D. J. Spiegelhalter, & C. C. Taylor (Eds.), Machine learning, neural and statistical classification. England: Ellis Horwood.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engels, R., & Theusinger, C. (1998). Using a data metric for offering preprocessing advice in data-mining applications. In H. Prade (Ed.), Proceedings of the 13th European conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 430–434). Chichester, England: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, T. (1997). Machine learning. New York: McGraw Hill.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Nakhaeizadeh, G., & Schnabl, A. (1997). Development of multi-criteria metrics for evaluation of data mining algorithms. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 37–42). Newport Beach, CA: AAAI Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pfahringer, B., Bensusan, H., & Giraud-Carrier, C. (2000). Meta-learning by landmarking various learning algorithms. In Proceedings of the 17th international conference on machine learning (pp. 743–750).

    Google Scholar 

  • Rice, J. R. (1976). The algorithm selection problem. Advances in Computers, 15, 65–118.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith-Miles, K. A. (2008). Cross-disciplinary perpectives on meta-learning for algorithm selection. ACM Computing Surveys, 41(1), Article No. 6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vilalta, R., & Drissi, Y. (2002). A perspective view and survey of metalearning. Artificial Intelligence Review, 18(2), 77–95.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this entry

Cite this entry

Brazdil, P., Vilalta, R., Giraud-Carrier, C., Soares, C. (2011). Metalearning. In: Sammut, C., Webb, G.I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Machine Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30164-8_538

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics