Definition
Cumulative learning (CL) exploits knowledge acquired on prior tasks to improve learning performance on subsequent related tasks. Consider, for example, a CL system that is learning to play chess. Here, one might expect the system to learn from prior games concepts (e.g., favorable board positions, standard openings, end games, etc.) that can be used for future learning. This is in contrast to base learning (Vilalta & Drissi, 2002) in which a fixed learning algorithm is applied to a single task and performance tends to improve only with more exemplars. So, in CL there tends to be explicit reuse of learned knowledge to constrain new learning, whereas base learning depends entirely upon new external inputs.
Relevant techniques for CL operate over multiple tasks, often at higher levels of abstraction, such as new problem space representations, task-based selection of learning algorithms, dynamic...
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Michelucci, P., Oblinger, D. (2011). Cumulative Learning. In: Sammut, C., Webb, G.I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Machine Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30164-8_191
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