Machine Learning: Lecture 1

Overview of Machine Learning

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Machine Learning: A Definition

Definition: A computer program is said to

learn from experience E with respect to some
class of tasks T and performance measure P, if
its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P,
improves with experience E.

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Examples of Successful
Applications of Machine Learning
 Learning to recognize spoken words (Lee,
1989; Waibel, 1989).
 Learning to drive an autonomous vehicle
(Pomerleau, 1989).
 Learning to classify new astronomical
structures (Fayyad et al., 1995).
 Learning to play world-class backgammon
(Tesauro 1992, 1995).

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 Why is Machine Learning
Important?
 Some tasks cannot be defined well, except by
examples (e.g., recognizing people).
 Relationships and correlations can be hidden within
large amounts of data. Machine Learning/Data
Mining may be able to find these relationships.
 Human designers often produce machines that do
not work as well as desired in the environments in
which they are used.

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 Why is Machine Learning Important
(Cont’d)?

 The amount of knowledge available about

certain tasks might be too large for explicit
encoding by humans (e.g., medical diagnostic).
 Environments change over time.
 New knowledge about tasks is constantly being
discovered by humans. It may be difficult to
continuously re-design systems “by hand”.

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 Areas of Influence for Machine
Learning
 Statistics: How best to use samples drawn from unknown
probability distributions to help decide from which
distribution some new sample is drawn?
 Brain Models: Non-linear elements with weighted inputs
(Artificial Neural Networks) have been suggested as simple
models of biological neurons.
 Adaptive Control Theory: How to deal with controlling a
process having unknown parameters that must be estimated
during operation?

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 Areas of Influence for Machine Learning (Cont’d)
 Psychology: How to model human performance on
various learning tasks?
 Artificial Intelligence: How to write algorithms to
acquire the knowledge humans are able to acquire, at
least, as well as humans?
 Evolutionary Models: How to model certain aspects
of biological evolution to improve the performance
of computer programs?

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Designing a Learning System:
An Example
1. Problem Description
2. Choosing the Training Experience
3. Choosing the Target Function
4. Choosing a Representation for the Target
Function
5. Choosing a Function Approximation Algorithm
6. Final Design

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1. Problem Description:
A Checker Learning Problem
 Task T: Playing Checkers
 Performance Measure P: Percent
of games won against opponents
 Training Experience E: To be
selected ==> Games Played against
itself
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2. Choosing the Training Experience
 Direct versus Indirect Experience [Indirect Experience gives
rise to the credit assignment problem and is thus more difficult]
 Teacher versus Learner Controlled Experience [the teacher
might provide training examples; the learner might suggest interesting
examples and ask the teacher for their outcome; or the learner can be
completely on its own with no access to correct outcomes]
 How Representative is the Experience? [Is the training
experience representative of the task the system will actually have to
solve? It is best if it is, but such a situation cannot systematically be
achieved]

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 3. Choosing the Target Function
 Given a set of legal moves, we want to learn how to choose the
best move [since the best move is not necessarily known, this is an
optimization problem]
 ChooseMove: B --> M is called a Target Function [ChooseMove,
however, is difficult to learn. An easier and related target function to learn is
V: B --> R, which assigns a numerical score to each board. The better the
board, the higher the score.]
 Operational versus Non-Operational Description of a Target
Function [An operational description must be given]
 Function Approximation [The actual function can often not be learned
and must be approximated]

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4. Choosing a Representation for
the Target Function
 Expressiveness versus Training set size [The more
expressive the representation of the target function, the closer to
the “truth” we can get. However, the more expressive the
representation, the more training examples are necessary to
choose among the large number of “representable”
possibilities.]
 Example of a representation:

x1/x2 = # of black/red pieces on the board wi’s are adjustable

x3/x4 = # of black/red king on the board
 or “learnable”
x5/x6 = # of black/red pieces threatened by red/black
coefficients
V(b) = w0+w1.x1+w2.x2+w3.x3+w4.x4+w5.x5+w6.x6
^
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 5. Choosing a Function
Approximation Algorithm
 Generating Training Examples of the form <b,Vtrain(b)>
[e.g. <x1=3, x2=0, x3=1, x4=0, x5=0, x6=0, +100 (=blacks won)]

Useful and Easy Approach: Vtrain(b) <- V(Successor(b))
 Training the System ^

Defining a criterion for success [What is the error that needs to be
minimized?]

Choose an algorithm capable of finding weights of a linear function
that minimize that error [e.g. the Least Mean Square (LMS) training
rule].

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 6. Final Design for Checkers Learning
 The Performance Module: Takes as input a new board and outputs
a trace of the game it played against itself.
 The Critic: Takes as input the trace of a game and outputs a set of
training examples of the target function
 The Generalizer: Takes as input training examples and outputs a
hypothesis which estimates the target function. Good generalization
to new cases is crucial.
 The Experiment Generator: Takes as input the current hypothesis
(currently learned function) and outputs a new problem (an initial
board state) for the performance system to explore

In this course, we are mostly concerned

with the generalizer 14
 Issues in Machine Learning (i.e.,
Generalization)
 What algorithms are available for learning a concept?
How well do they perform?
 How much training data is sufficient to learn a concept
with high confidence?
 When is it useful to use prior knowledge?
 Are some training examples more useful than others?
 What are best tasks for a system to learn?
 What is the best way for a system to represent its
knowledge?

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