machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

, instance-based learning (sometimes called memory-based learning) is a family of learning algorithms that, instead of performing explicit generalization, compare new problem instances with instances seen in training, which have been stored in memory. Because computation is postponed until a new instance is observed, these algorithms are sometimes referred to as "lazy." It is called instance-based because it constructs hypotheses directly from the training instances themselves. Stuart Russell and

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born 14 December 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is th ...

(2003). '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'', second edition, p. 733. Prentice Hall. This means that the hypothesis complexity can grow with the data: in the worst case, a hypothesis is a list of ''n'' training items and the computational complexity of

classifying Classification is the activity of assigning objects to some pre-existing classes or categories. This is distinct from the task of establishing the classes themselves (for example through cluster analysis). Examples include diagnostic tests, identif ...

a single new instance is ''O''(''n''). One advantage that instance-based learning has over other methods of machine learning is its ability to adapt its model to previously unseen data. Instance-based learners may simply store a new instance or throw an old instance away. Examples of instance-based learning algorithms are the ''k''-nearest neighbors algorithm, kernel machines and RBF networks. These store (a subset of) their training set; when predicting a value/class for a new instance, they compute distances or similarities between this instance and the training instances to make a decision. To battle the memory complexity of storing all training instances, as well as the risk of

overfitting In mathematical modeling, overfitting is "the production of an analysis that corresponds too closely or exactly to a particular set of data, and may therefore fail to fit to additional data or predict future observations reliably". An overfi ...

to noise in the training set, ''instance reduction'' algorithms have been proposed.

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Machine learning {{AI-stub

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