Abstract
The problem of formulating general concepts from specific training examples has long been a major focus of machine learning research. While most previous research has focused on empirical methods for generalizing from a large number of training examples using no domain-specific knowledge, in the past few years new methods have been developed for applying domain-specific knowledge to formulate valid generalizations from single training examples. The characteristic common to these methods is that their ability to generalize from a single example follows from their ability to explain why the training example is a member of the concept being learned. This paper proposes a general, domain-independent mechanism, called EBG, that unifies previous approaches to explanation-based generalization. The EBG method is illustrated in the context of several example problems, and used to contrast several existing systems for explanation-based generalization. The perspective on explanation-based generalization afforded by this general method is also used to identify open research problems in this area.
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Mitchell, T.M., Keller, R.M. & Kedar-Cabelli, S.T. Explanation-Based Generalization: A Unifying View. Mach Learn 1, 47–80 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022691120807
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022691120807