11 Incremental Learning of Concept Descriptions: A Method and Experimental Results R. E. Reinke R. S. Michalski

Such methods can effectively and efficiently induce good descriptions from a given set of examples and, optionally, induce counter-examples (for example Michalski, 1975, 1980a; Quinlan, 1979; Langley et al., 1983). These methods cannot modify concept descriptions which are contradicted by new examples, but must re-learn the descriptions from scratch. In contrast, incremental learning methods modify concept descriptions to accommodate new learning events (Winston, 1975; Michalski and Larson, 1978). When we observe human learning we clearly see that it is incremental.