Report 77-13 Version Spaces: A Candidate Elimination S gr

A candidate elimination algorithm has been shown whicn will find all rule versions consistent with all training instances. Backtracking is not required for noise-free training instances, and the final result is independent of the order of presentation of instances. Version spaces provide at once a compact summary of past training instances and a representation of all plausible rule versions. Pecause they provide an explicit representation for the space of plausible rules, version spaces allow a program to represent "how much it doesn't know" about the correct form of the rule. This suggests the utility of the version space approach to problems such as intelligent selection of training instances and merging sets of independently generated rules.