Incremental Learning from Noisy Data

  • Authors:
  • Jeffrey C. Schlimmer;Richard H. Granger, Jr.

  • Affiliations:
  • Irvine Computational Intelligence Project, Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92717, U.S.A. SCHLIMMER@ICS.UCI.EDU;Irvine Computational Intelligence Project, Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92717, U.S.A. GRANGER@ICS.UCI.EDU

  • Venue:
  • Machine Learning
  • Year:
  • 1986

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Induction of a concept description given noisy instances is difficult and is further exacerbated when the concepts may change over time. This paper presents a solution which has been guided by psychological and mathematical results. The method is based on a distributed concept description which is composed of a set of weighted, symbolic characterizations. Two learning processes incrementally modify this description. One adjusts the characterization weights and another creates new characterizations. The latter process is described in terms of a search through the space of possibilities and is shown to require linear space with respect to the number of attribute-value pairs in the description language. The method utilizes previously acquired concept definitions in subsequent learning by adding an attribute for each learned concept to instance descriptions. A program called STAGGER fully embodies this method, and this paper reports on a number of empirical analyses of its performance. Since understanding the relationships between a new learning method and existing ones can be difficult, this paper first reviews a framework for discussing machine learning systems and then describes STAGGER in that framework.