Concept Learning

• Inducing general functions from specific training examples is a

main issue of machine learning.
• Concept Learning: Acquiring the definition of a general category
from given sample positive and negative training examples of the
category.
• Concept Learning can seen as a problem of searching through
a predefined space of potential hypotheses for the hypothesis
that best fits the training examples.
• The hypothesis space has a general-to-specific ordering of hypotheses,
and the search can be efficiently organized by taking advantage of a
naturally occurring structure over the hypothesis space.

Machine Learning 1
 Concept Learning
• A Formal Definition for Concept Learning:

Inferring a boolean-valued function from training examples

of its input and output.

• An example for concept-learning is the learning of bird-concept from

the given examples of birds (positive examples) and non-birds
(negative examples).
• We are trying to learn the definition of a concept from given examples.

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 A Concept Learning Task – Enjoy Sport
Training Examples

Example Sky AirTemp Humidity Wind Water Forecast EnjoySport

1 Sunny Warm Normal Strong Warm Same YES

2 Sunny Warm High Strong Warm Same YES

3 Rainy Cold High Strong Warm Change NO

4 Sunny Warm High Strong Warm Change YES

ATTRIBUTES

CONCEPT
• A set of example days, and each is described by six attributes.
• The task is to learn to predict the value of EnjoySport for arbitrary
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 EnjoySport – Hypothesis Representation
• Each hypothesis consists of a conjuction of constraints on
the instance attributes.
• Each hypothesis will be a vector of six constraints, specifying the
values of the six attributes
– (Sky, AirTemp, Humidity, Wind, Water, and Forecast).
• Each attribute will be:
? - indicating any value is acceptable for the attribute (don’t care)
single value – specifying a single required value (ex. Warm)
(specific)
0 - indicating no value is acceptable for the attribute (no value)

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 Hypothesis Representation
• A hypothesis:
Sky AirTemp Humidity Water Forecast
Wind
< Sunny, ? , ? , Strong , ? , Same >
• The most general hypothesis – that every day is a positive example
<?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?>
• The most specific hypothesis – that no day is a positive example
<0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0>
• EnjoySport concept learning task requires learning the sets of days
for which EnjoySport=yes, describing this set by a conjunction of
constraints over the instance attributes.

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 EnjoySport Concept Learning Task
Given
– Instances X : set of all possible days, each described by the attributes
• Sky – (values: Sunny, Cloudy, Rainy)
• AirTemp – (values: Warm, Cold)
• Humidity – (values: Normal, High)
• Wind – (values: Strong, Weak)
• Water – (values: Warm, Cold)
• Forecast – (values: Same, Change)
– Target Concept (Function) c : EnjoySport : X  {0,1}
– Hypotheses H : Each hypothesis is described by a conjunction of constraints on
the attributes.
– Training Examples D : positive and negative examples of the target function
Determine
– A hypothesis h in H such that h(x) = c(x) for all x in D.
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 The Inductive Learning Hypothesis
• Although the learning task is to determine a hypothesis h identical to
the target concept cover the entire set of instances X, the only
information available about c is its value over the training examples.
– Inductive learning algorithms can at best guarantee that the output hypothesis fits the
target concept over the training data.
– Lacking any further information, our assumption is that the best hypothesis
regarding unseen instances is the hypothesis that best fits the observed
training data. This is the fundamental assumption of inductive learning.

• The Inductive Learning Hypothesis - Any hypothesis found to

approximate the target function well over a sufficiently large set of
training examples will also approximate the target function well
over other unobserved examples.

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An technique of machine learning called inductive learning trains a model
to generate predictions based on examples or observations. During
inductive learning, the model picks up knowledge from particular
examples or instances and generalizes it such that it can predict outcomes
for brand-new data
 Concept Learning As Search
• Concept learning can be viewed as the task of searching through a
large space of hypotheses implicitly defined by the hypothesis
representation.
• The goal of this search is to find the hypothesis that best fits the
training examples.
• By selecting a hypothesis representation, the designer of the learning
algorithm implicitly defines the space of all hypotheses that the
program can ever represent and therefore can ever learn.

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 Enjoy Sport - Hypothesis Space
• Sky has 3 possible values, and other 5 attributes have 2 possible
values.
• There are 96 (= 3.2.2.2.2.2) distinct instances in X.
• There are 5120 (=5.4.4.4.4.4) syntactically distinct hypotheses in H.
– Two more values for attributes: ? and 0
• Every hypothesis containing one or more 0 symbols represents the
empty set of instances; that is, it classifies every instance as
negative.
• There are 973 (= 1 + 4.3.3.3.3.3) semantically distinct hypotheses in
H.
– Only one more value for attributes: ?, and one hypothesis representing empty set
of instances.
• Although EnjoySport has small, finite hypothesis space, most
learning tasks have much larger (even infinite) hypothesis spaces.
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– We need efficient search algorithms on the hypothesis spaces.

 General-to-Specific Ordering of Hypotheses
• Many algorithms for concept learning organize the search through the hypothesis
space by relying on a general-to-specific ordering of hypotheses.
• By taking advantage of this naturally occurring structure over the hypothesis space, we
can design learning algorithms that exhaustively search even infinite hypothesis spaces
without explicitly enumerating every hypothesis.

• Consider two hypotheses

h1 = (Sunny, ?, ?, Strong, ?, ?)
h2 = (Sunny, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)

• Now consider the sets of instances that are classified positive by hl and by h2.
– Because h2 imposes fewer constraints on the instance, it classifies more instances
as positive.
– In fact, any instance classified positive by hl will also be classified positive by h2.
– Therefore, we say that h2 is more general than hl.

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 More-General-Than Relation
• For any instance x in X and hypothesis h in H, we say that x satisfies
h if and only if h(x) = 1.

• More-General-Than-Or-Equal Relation:
Let h1 and h2 be two boolean-valued functions defined over X.
Then h1 is more-general-than-or-equal-to h2 (written h1
≥ h2) if and only if
any instance that satisfies h2 also satisfies h1.

• h1 is more-general-than h2 ( h1 > h2) if and only if h1≥h2 is true

and h2≥h1 is false. We also say h2 is more-specific-than h1.

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 More-General-Relation

• h2 > h1 and h2 > h3

• But there is no more-general relation between h1 and
h3
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 FIND-S Algorithm
• FIND-S Algorithm starts from the most specific hypothesis and
generalize it by considering only positive examples.
• FIND-S algorithm ignores negative examples.
– As long as the hypothesis space contains a hypothesis that describes the true target
concept, and the training data contains no errors, ignoring negative examples does not
cause to any problem.
• FIND-S algorithm finds the most specific hypothesis within H that
is consistent with the positive training examples.
– The final hypothesis will also be consistent with negative examples if the correct
target concept is in H, and the training examples are correct.

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 FIND-S Algorithm
1. Initialize h to the most specific hypothesis in H
2. For each positive training instance
x For each attribute constraint a,
in h
If the constraint a, is satisfied by
x Then do nothing
Else replace a, in h by the next more general constraint that
is satisfied by x
3. Output hypothesis h

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FIND-S Algorithm - Example

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 Unanswered Questions by FIND-S Algorithm
• Has FIND-S converged to the correct target concept?
– Although FIND-S will find a hypothesis consistent with the training data, it has no way
to determine whether it has found the only hypothesis in H consistent with the data (i.e.,
the correct target concept), or whether there are many other consistent hypotheses as
well.
– We would prefer a learning algorithm that could determine whether it had converged
and, if not, at least characterize its uncertainty regarding the true identity of the target
concept.

• Why prefer the most specific hypothesis?

– In case there are multiple hypotheses consistent with the training examples, FIND-S
will find the most specific.
– It is unclear whether we should prefer this hypothesis over, say, the most general, or
some other hypothesis of intermediate generality.

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 Unanswered Questions by FIND-S Algorithm
• Are the training examples consistent?
– In most practical learning problems there is some chance that the training examples
will contain at least some errors or noise.
– Such inconsistent sets of training examples can severely mislead FIND-S, given the
fact that it ignores negative examples.
– We would prefer an algorithm that could at least detect when the training data
is inconsistent and, preferably, accommodate such errors.

• What if there are several maximally specific consistent

hypotheses?
– In the hypothesis language H for the EnjoySport task, there is always a unique,
most specific hypothesis consistent with any set of positive examples.
– However, for other hypothesis spaces there can be several maximally specific
hypotheses consistent with the data.
– In this case, FIND-S must be extended to allow it to backtrack on its choices of how to
generalize the hypothesis, to accommodate the possibility that the target concept lies
along a different branch of the partial ordering than the branch it has selected.

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 Candidate-Elimination Algorithm
• FIND-S outputs a hypothesis from H, that is consistent with the
training examples, this is just one of many hypotheses from H that
might fit the training data equally well.
• The key idea in the Candidate-Elimination algorithm is to output
a description of the set of all hypotheses consistent with the
training examples.
– Candidate-Elimination algorithm computes the description of this set without
explicitly enumerating all of its members.
– This is accomplished by using the more-general-than partial ordering and maintaining
a compact representation of the set of consistent hypotheses.

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 Consistent Hypothesis

• The key difference between this definition of consistent and

satisfies.
• An example x is said to satisfy hypothesis h when h(x) = 1,
regardless of whether x is a positive or negative example
of the target concept.
• However, whether such an example is consistent with h
depends on the target concept, and in particular, whether h(x) =
c(x). Machine Learning 20
 Version Spaces
• The Candidate-Elimination algorithm represents the set of
all hypotheses consistent with the observed training examples.
• This subset of all hypotheses is called the version space with
respect to the hypothesis space H and the training examples D,
because it contains all plausible versions of the target
concept.

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 List-Then-Eliminate Algorithm
• List-Then-Eliminate algorithm initializes the version space to contain
all hypotheses in H, then eliminates any hypothesis found inconsistent
with any training example.
• The version space of candidate hypotheses thus shrinks as more
examples are observed, until ideally just one hypothesis remains that
is consistent with all the observed examples.
– Presumably, this is the desired target concept.
– If insufficient data is available to narrow the version space to a single hypothesis, then
the algorithm can output the entire set of hypotheses consistent with the observed data.
• List-Then-Eliminate algorithm can be applied whenever the
hypothesis space H is finite.
– It has many advantages, including the fact that it is guaranteed to output all
hypotheses consistent with the training data.
– Unfortunately, it requires exhaustively enumerating all hypotheses in H - an
unrealistic requirement for all but the most trivial hypothesis spaces.

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List-Then-Eliminate Algorithm

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 Compact Representation of Version Spaces
• A version space can be represented with its general and
specific boundary sets.
• The Candidate-Elimination algorithm represents the version space
by storing only its most general members G and its most specific
members S.
• Given only these two sets S and G, it is possible to enumerate all
members of a version space by generating hypotheses that lie
between these two sets in general-to-specific partial ordering over
hypotheses.
• Every member of the version space lies between these boundaries

where x ≥y means x is more general or equal to

y.
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 Example Version Space

• A version space with its general and specific boundary

sets.
• The version space includes all six hypotheses shown
here, but can be represented more simply by S and G.
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 Candidate-Elimination Algorithm
• The Candidate-Elimination algorithm computes the version space containing all
hypotheses from H that are consistent with an observed sequence of training examples.
• It begins by initializing the version space to the set of all hypotheses in H; that is, by
initializing the G boundary set to contain the most general hypothesis in H
G0  { <?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?> }
and initializing the S boundary set to contain the most specific hypothesis
S0  { <0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0> }
• These two boundary sets delimit the entire hypothesis space, because every other
hypothesis in H is both more general than S0 and more specific than G0.
• As each training example is considered, the S and G boundary sets are generalized and
specialized, respectively, to eliminate from the version space any hypotheses found
inconsistent with the new training example.
• After all examples have been processed, the computed version space contains all the
hypotheses consistent with these examples and only these hypotheses.

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 Candidate-Elimination Algorithm
• Initialize G to the set of maximally general hypotheses in H
• Initialize S to the set of maximally specific hypotheses in H
• For each training example d, do
– If d is a positive example
• Remove from G any hypothesis inconsistent with d ,
• For each hypothesis s in S that is not consistent with d ,-
– Remove s from S
– Add to S all minimal generalizations h of s such that
» h is consistent with d, and some member of G is more general than h
– Remove from S any hypothesis that is more general than another hypothesis in
S
– If d is a negative example
• Remove from S any hypothesis inconsistent with d
• For each hypothesis g in G that is not consistent with d
– Remove g from G
– Add to G all minimal specializations h of g such that
» h is consistent with d, and some member of S is more specific than h
– Remove from G any hypothesis that is less general than another hypothesis in G
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Candidate-Elimination Algorithm - Example
•S0 and G0 are the initial
boundary sets corresponding to
the most specific and most
general hypotheses.

•Training examples 1 and 2

force the S boundary to become
more general.

• They have no effect on the G

boundary

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Candidate-Elimination Algorithm - Example

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 Candidate-Elimination Algorithm - Example
• Given that there are six attributes that could be specified to specialize
G2, why are there only three new hypotheses in G3?
• For example, the hypothesis h = <?, ?, Normal, ?, ?, ?> is a minimal
specialization of G2 that correctly labels the new example as a
negative example, but it is not included in G3.
– The reason this hypothesis is excluded is that it is inconsistent with S2.
– The algorithm determines this simply by noting that h is not more general than the
current specific boundary, S2.
• In fact, the S boundary of the version space forms a summary of the
previously encountered positive examples that can be used to
determine whether any given hypothesis is consistent with these
examples.
• The G boundary summarizes the information from previously
encountered negative examples. Any hypothesis more specific than G
is assured to be consistent with past negative examples
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Candidate-Elimination Algorithm - Example

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 Candidate-Elimination Algorithm - Example
• The fourth training example further generalizes the S boundary of
the version space.
• It also results in removing one member of the G boundary, because
this member fails to cover the new positive example.
– To understand the rationale for this step, it is useful to consider why the
offending hypothesis must be removed from G.
– Notice it cannot be specialized, because specializing it would not make it cover the
new example.
– It also cannot be generalized, because by the definition of G, any more general
hypothesis will cover at least one negative training example.
– Therefore, the hypothesis must be dropped from the G boundary, thereby removing an
entire branch of the partial ordering from the version space of hypotheses remaining
under consideration

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Candidate-Elimination Algorithm – Example
Final Version Space

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 Candidate-Elimination Algorithm – Example
Final Version Space
• After processing these four examples, the boundary sets S4 and G4
delimit the version space of all hypotheses consistent with the set
of incrementally observed training examples.
• This learned version space is independent of the sequence in which
the training examples are presented (because in the end it contains all
hypotheses consistent with the set of examples).
• As further training data is encountered, the S and G boundaries
will move monotonically closer to each other, delimiting a smaller
and smaller version space of candidate hypotheses.

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 Will Candidate-Elimination Algorithm
Converge to Correct Hypothesis?
• The version space learned by the Candidate-Elimination Algorithm will
converge toward the hypothesis that correctly describes the target
concept, provided
– There are no errors in the training examples, and
– there is some hypothesis in H that correctly describes the target concept.
• What will happen if the training data contains errors?
– The algorithm removes the correct target concept from the version space.
– S and G boundary sets eventually converge to an empty version space if
sufficient additional training data is available.
– Such an empty version space indicates that there is no hypothesis in H consistent with
all observed training examples.
• A similar symptom will appear when the training examples are
correct, but the target concept cannot be described in the hypothesis
representation.
– e.g., if the target concept is a disjunction of feature attributes and the hypothesis
space supports only conjunctive descriptions
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What Training Example Should the Learner Request Next?

• We have assumed that training examples are provided to the learner

by some external teacher.
• Suppose instead that the learner is allowed to conduct experiments in
which it chooses the next instance, then obtains the correct
classification for this instance from an external oracle (e.g., nature or a
teacher).
– This scenario covers situations in which the learner may conduct experiments in nature or
in which a teacher is available to provide the correct classification.
– We use the term query to refer to such instances constructed by the learner, which are
then classified by an external oracle.
• Considering the version space learned from the four training
examples of the EnjoySport concept.
– What would be a good query for the learner to pose at this point?
– What is a good query strategy in general?

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What Training Example Should the Learner Request Next?

• The learner should attempt to discriminate among the alternative competing

hypotheses in its current version space.
– Therefore, it should choose an instance that would be classified positive by some of
these hypotheses, but negative by others.
– One such instance is <Sunny, Warm, Normal, Light, Warm, Same>
– This instance satisfies three of the six hypotheses in the current version space.
– If the trainer classifies this instance as a positive example, the S boundary of the
version space can then be generalized.
– Alternatively, if the trainer indicates that this is a negative example, the G boundary
can then be specialized.
• In general, the optimal query strategy for a concept learner is to generate instances that
satisfy exactly half the hypotheses in the current version space.
• When this is possible, the size of the version space is reduced by half with each new
example, and the correct target concept can therefore be found with only log2 |
VS|  experiments.

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 How Can Partially Learned Concepts Be Used?
• Even though the learned version space still contains multiple
hypotheses, indicating that the target concept has not yet been fully
learned, it is possible to classify certain examples with the same
degree of confidence as if the target concept had been uniquely
identified.

• Let us assume that the followings are new instances to be classified:

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 How Can Partially Learned Concepts Be Used?
• Instance A was is classified as a positive instance by every hypothesis in the current
version space.
• Because the hypotheses in the version space unanimously agree that this is a positive
instance, the learner can classify instance A as positive with the same confidence it
would have if it had already converged to the single, correct target concept.
• Regardless of which hypothesis in the version space is eventually found to be the
correct target concept, it is already clear that it will classify instance A as a positive
example.
• Notice furthermore that we need not enumerate every hypothesis in the version space
in order to test whether each classifies the instance as positive.
– This condition will be met if and only if the instance satisfies every member of S.
– The reason is that every other hypothesis in the version space is at least as general as
some member of S.
– By our definition of more-general-than, if the new instance satisfies all members of S
it must also satisfy each of these more general hypotheses.

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 How Can Partially Learned Concepts Be Used?
• Instance B is classified as a negative instance by every hypothesis
in the version space.
– This instance can therefore be safely classified as negative, given the partially
learned concept.
– An efficient test for this condition is that the instance satisfies none of the members
of G.
• Half of the version space hypotheses classify instance C as positive
and half classify it as negative.
– Thus, the learner cannot classify this example with confidence until further
training examples are available.
• Instance D is classified as positive by two of the version
space hypotheses and negative by the other four hypotheses.
– In this case we have less confidence in the classification than in the unambiguous cases
of instances A and B.
– Still, the vote is in favor of a negative classification, and one approach we could take
would be to output the majority vote, perhaps with a confidence rating indicating how
close the vote was.
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 Inductive Bias - Fundamental Questions
for Inductive Inference
• The Candidate-Elimination Algorithm will converge toward the true
target concept provided it is given accurate training examples and
provided its initial hypothesis space contains the target concept.

• What if the target concept is not contained in the hypothesis space?

• Can we avoid this difficulty by using a hypothesis space that
includes every possible hypothesis?
• How does the size of this hypothesis space influence the ability of
the algorithm to generalize to unobserved instances?
• How does the size of the hypothesis space influence the number
of training examples that must be observed?

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 Inductive Bias - A Biased Hypothesis Space
• In EnjoySport example, we restricted the hypothesis space to include only
conjunctions of attribute values.
– Because of this restriction, the hypothesis space is unable to represent even
simple disjunctive target concepts such as "Sky = Sunny or Sky = Cloudy."

• From first two examples  S2 : <?, Warm, Normal, Strong, Cool, Change>
• This is inconsistent with third examples, and there are no hypotheses consistent
with these three examples
PROBLEM: We have biased the learner to consider only conjunctive hypotheses.
 We require a more expressive hypothesis space.
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 Inductive Bias - An Unbiased Learner
• The obvious solution to the problem of assuring that the target concept
is in the hypothesis space H is to provide a hypothesis space capable
of representing every teachable concept.
– Every possible subset of the instances X  the power set of X.

• What is the size of the hypothesis space H (the power set of X) ?

– In EnjoySport, the size of the instance space X is 96.
– The size of the power set of X is 2|X|  The size of H is 296
– Our conjunctive hypothesis space is able to represent only 973of these
hypotheses.
 a very biased hypothesis space

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 Inductive Bias - An Unbiased Learner : Problem
• Let the hypothesis space H to be the power set of X.
– A hypothesis can be represented with disjunctions, conjunctions, and negations of
our earlier hypotheses.
– The target concept "Sky = Sunny or Sky = Cloudy" could then be described as
<Sunny, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?> v <Cloudy, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?>

NEW PROBLEM: our concept learning algorithm is now

completely unable to generalize beyond the observed examples.
– three positive examples (xl,x2,x3) and two negative examples (x4,x5) to the learner.
– S : { x1 v x2 v x3 } and G : {  (x4 v x5) }  NO
GENERALIZATION
– Therefore, the only examples that will be unambiguously classified by S and G are
the observed training examples themselves.

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 Inductive Bias –
Fundamental Property of Inductive Inference

• A learner that makes no a priori assumptions regarding the

identity of the target concept has no rational basis for classifying
any unseen instances.

• Inductive Leap: A learner should be able to generalize training

data using prior assumptions in order to classify unseen instances.
• The generalization is known as inductive leap and our
prior assumptions are the inductive bias of the learner.
• Inductive Bias (prior assumptions) of Candidate-Elimination Algorithm
is that the target concept can be represented by a conjunction of
attribute values, the target concept is contained in the hypothesis space
and training examples are correct.

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 Inductive Bias – Formal Definition
Inductive Bias:
Consider a concept learning algorithm L for the set of instances X.
Let c be an arbitrary concept defined over X, and
let Dc = {<x , c(x)>} be an arbitrary set of training examples of c.
Let L(xi, Dc) denote the classification assigned to the instance xi by L
after training on the data Dc.
The inductive bias of L is any minimal set of assertions B such that
for any target concept c and corresponding training examples Dc the
following formula holds.

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 Inductive Bias – Three Learning Algorithms
ROTE-LEARNER: Learning corresponds simply to storing each observed training
example in memory. Subsequent instances are classified by looking them up in
memory. If the instance is found in memory, the stored classification is returned.
Otherwise, the system refuses to classify the new instance.
Inductive Bias: No inductive bias

CANDIDATE-ELIMINATION: New instances are classified only in the case where all
members of the current version space agree on the classification. Otherwise, the
system refuses to classify the new instance.
Inductive Bias: the target concept can be represented in its hypothesis space.

FIND-S: This algorithm, described earlier, finds the most specific hypothesis consistent
with the training examples. It then uses this hypothesis to classify all subsequent
instances.
Inductive Bias: the target concept can be represented in its hypothesis space, and all
instances are negative instances unless the opposite is entailed by its other know1edge.

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 Concept Learning - Summary
• Concept learning can be seen as a problem of searching through a
large predefined space of potential hypotheses.
• The general-to-specific partial ordering of hypotheses provides a
useful structure for organizing the search through the hypothesis space.
• The FIND-S algorithm utilizes this general-to-specific ordering,
performing a specific-to-general search through the hypothesis
space along one branch of the partial ordering, to find the most
specific hypothesis consistent with the training examples.
• The CANDIDATE-ELIMINATION algorithm utilizes this general-to-
specific ordering to compute the version space (the set of all hypotheses
consistent with the training data) by incrementally computing the sets
of maximally specific (S) and maximally general (G) hypotheses.

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 Concept Learning - Summary
• Because the S and G sets delimit the entire set of hypotheses
consistent with the data, they provide the learner with a description of
its uncertainty regarding the exact identity of the target concept. This
version space of alternative hypotheses can be examined
– to determine whether the learner has converged to the target concept,
– to determine when the training data are inconsistent,
– to generate informative queries to further refine the version space, and
– to determine which unseen instances can be unambiguously classified based on the
partially learned concept.
• The CANDIDATE-ELIMINATION algorithm is not robust to noisy
data or to situations in which the unknown target concept is not
expressible in the provided hypothesis space.

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 Concept Learning - Summary
• Inductive learning algorithms are able to classify unseen examples
only because of their implicit inductive bias for selecting one
consistent hypothesis over another.
• If the hypothesis space is enriched to the point where there is a
hypothesis corresponding to every possible subset of instances (the
power set of the instances), this will remove any inductive bias from
the CANDIDATE-ELIMINATION algorithm .
– Unfortunately, this also removes the ability to classify any instance beyond the
observed training examples.
– An unbiased learner cannot make inductive leaps to classify unseen examples.

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