What is a Concept? Concept of Cats Concept of Birds Concept of Fishes Concept of Horses Concept of Dogs

A concept describes a subset of objects or events defined over a larger set MLDM-Berlin 3 Concept Learning • Acquire/Infer the definition of a general concept or category given a (labeled) sample of positive and negative training examples of the category – Each concept can be thought of as a Boolean-valued (true/false or yes/no) function • Approximate a Boolean-valued function from examples – Concept learning can be formulated as a problem of searching through a predefined space of potential hypotheses for the hypothesis that best fits the training examples – Take advantage of a naturally occurring structure over the hypothesis space • General-to-specific ordering of hypotheses learning based on symbolic representation