Rules and Similarity in Concept Learning
Joshua B. Tenenbaum · 1999
This paper argues that two apparently distinct modes of generalizing concepts – abstracting rules and computing similarity to exemplars – should both be seen as special cases of a more general Bayesian learning framework. Bayes explains the specific workings of these two modes – which rules are abstracted, how similarity is measured – as well as why generalization should appear rule- or similarity-based in different situations. This analysis also suggests why the rules/similarity distinction, even if not computationally fundamental, may still be useful at the algorithmic level as part of a principled approximation to fully Bayesian learning. 1