Towards a Better Understanding of Memory-Based Reasoning Systems

摘要

We quantify both experimentally and analytically the performance of memory-based reasoning (MBR) algorithms. To start gaining insight into the capabilities of MBR algorithms, we compare an MBR algorithm using a value difference metric to a popular Bayesian classifier. These two approaches are similar in that they both make certain independence assumptions about the data. However, whereas MBR uses specific cases to perform classification, Bayesian methods summarize the data probabilistically. We demonstrate that a particular MBR system called Pebls works comparatively well on a wide range of domains using both real and artificial data. With respect to the artificial data, we consider distributions where the concept classes are separated by functional discriminants, as well as time-series data generated by Markov models of varying complexity. Finally, we show formally that Pebls can learn (in the limit) natural concept classes that the Bayesian classifier cannot learn, and that it will attain perfect accuracy whenever Bayes does.