Tracking Context Changes through Meta-Learning

  • Authors:
  • Gerhard Widmer

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Medical Cybernetics and AI, University of Vienna, and Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: gerhard@ai.univie.ac. ...

  • Venue:
  • Machine Learning - Special issue on multistrategy learning
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

The article deals with the problem of learning incrementally(‘on-line’) in domains where the target concepts arecontext-dependent, so that changes in context can produce more orless radical changes in the associated concepts. In particular, weconcentrate on a class of learning tasks where the domain providesexplicit clues as to the current context (e.g.,attributes with characteristic values). A general two-level learning model ispresented that effectively adjusts to changing contexts by trying todetect (via ‘meta-learning’) contextual clues and using thisinformation to focus the learning process. Context learning anddetection occur during regular on-line learning, withoutseparate training phases for context recognition. Two operationalsystems based on this model are presented that differ in theunderlying learning algorithm and in the way they use contextualinformation: METAL(B) combines meta-learning with a Bayesianclassifier, while METAL(IB) is based on an instance-based learningalgorithm. Experiments with synthetic domains as well as a number of‘real-world” problems show that the algorithms are robust in avariety of dimensions, and that meta-learning can produce substantialincreases in accuracy over simple object-level learning in situationswith changing contexts.