Futility of Bias-Free Learning
- A learner that makes no a priori assumptions regarding
the identity of the target concept has no rational basis for
classifying any unseen instances.
- So, what is the inductive bias?
- Given an algorithm and a set of training instances
, let be the
classification given to by after training on
. The inductive bias of is any minimal set
of assertions for any target concept and examples
s.t.
- For example, the inductive bias of the
Candidate-Elimination algorithm (with voting) is the
assumption that the target concept is contained in the
hypothesis space.
- That is, if we make that assumption then the
classification follows logically (by
deduction).