Meta-Learning

Abstract

The field of meta-learning has as one of its primary goals the understanding of the interaction between the mechanism of learning and the concrete contexts in which that mechanism is applicable. The field has seen a continuous growth in the past years with interesting new developments in the construction of practical model-selection assistants, task-adaptive learners, and a solid conceptual framework. In this chapter we give an overview of different techniques necessary to build meta-learning systems. We begin by describing an idealized meta-learning architecture comprising a variety of relevant component techniques. We then look at how each technique has been studied and implemented by previous research. In addition we show how meta-learning has already been identified as an important component in real-world applications.