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Online Learning

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Abstract

Online learning and its variants are one of the main models of computational learning theory, complementing statistical PAC learning and related models. An online learner needs to make predictions about a sequence of instances, one after the other, and receives feedback after each prediction. The performance of the online learner is typically compared to the best predictor from a given class, often in terms of its excess loss (the regret) over the best predictor. Some of the fundamental online learning algorithms and their variants are discussed: weighted majority, follow the perturbed leader, follow the regularized leader, the perceptron algorithm, the doubling trick, bandit algorithms, and the issue of adaptive versus oblivious instance sequences. A typical performance proof of an online learning algorithm is exemplified for the perceptron algorithm.

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Correspondence to Peter Auer .

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© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Auer, P. (2017). Online Learning. In: Sammut, C., Webb, G.I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Mining. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7687-1_618

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