Observation Language

Synonyms

Instance language

Definition

The observation language used by a machine learning system is the language in which the observations it learns from are described.

Motivation and Background

Most machine learning algorithms can be seen as a procedure for deriving one or more hypotheses from a set of observations. Both the input (the observations) and the output (the hypotheses) need to be described in some particular language and this language is called the observation language or the Hypothesis Language respectively. These terms are mostly used in the context of symbolic learning, where these languages are often more complex than in subsymbolic or statistical learning.

The following sections describe some of the key observation languages.

Attribute-Value Learning

Probably the most used setting in machine learning is the attribute-value setting (see Attribute-Value Learning). Here, an example (observation) is described by a fixed set of attributes, each of which is given a value...