Constructive Induction-based Learning Agents: An Architecture and Preliminary Experiments

This paper introduces a new type of intelligent agent called a constructive induction-based learning agent (CILA). This agent differs from other adaptive agents because it has the ability to not only learn how to assist a user in some task, but also to incrementally adapt its knowledge representation space to better fit the given learning task. The agent’s ability to autonomously make problem-oriented modifications to the originally given representation space is due to its constructive induction (CI) learning method. Selective induction (SI) learning methods, and agents based on these methods, rely on a good representation space. A good representation space has no misclassification noise, inter-correlated attributes or irrelevant attributes. Our proposed CILA has methods for overcoming all of these problems. In agent domains with poor representations, the CIbased learning agent will learn more accurate rules and be more useful than an SI-based learning agent. This paper gives an architecture for a CI-based learning agent and gives an empirical comparison of a CI and SI for a set of six abstract domains involving DNF-type (disjunctive normal form) descriptions.