Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 11 (NIPS 1998)
Joshua Tenenbaum
I consider the problem of learning concepts from small numbers of pos(cid:173) itive examples, a feat which humans perform routinely but which com(cid:173) puters are rarely capable of. Bridging machine learning and cognitive science perspectives, I present both theoretical analysis and an empirical study with human subjects for the simple task oflearning concepts corre(cid:173) sponding to axis-aligned rectangles in a multidimensional feature space. Existing learning models, when applied to this task, cannot explain how subjects generalize from only a few examples of the concept. I propose a principled Bayesian model based on the assumption that the examples are a random sample from the concept to be learned. The model gives precise fits to human behavior on this simple task and provides qualitati ve insights into more complex, realistic cases of concept learning.