Discussion

Abstract

This book has investigated learning in a lifelong context. Lifelong learning addresses cases where a learner faces a whole collection of learning tasks over its entire lifetime. If these tasks are appropriately related, knowledge learned in the first n - 1 tasks can be transferred to the n-th task to boost the generalization accuracy. Two special cases of lifelong learning problems have been investigated in this book: lifelong supervised learning and lifelong control learning. In both cases, lifelong learning involves learning at a meta-level, in which whole spaces of appropriate base-level hypotheses are considered. Consequently, learning at the meta-level requires different representations than base-level learning.