Small Disjuncts in Action: Learning to Diagnose Errors in the Local Loop of the Telephone Network

Abstract

Learning general rules is a basic goal of many concept learning systems. In a 1989 paper, Holte, Acker, and Porter pointed out that this bias toward generality had resulted in a problem with small disjuncts. The problem they discussed was that small disjuncts had high rates of misclassification, and that it was difficult to eliminate the error-prone small disjuncts without affecting the performance of other disjuncts. We describe a real domain based on NYNEX MAX, an expert system that diagnoses the local loop in a telephone network. We demonstrate with two inductive learning systems that a range of disjunct sizes is important for this domain despite the relatively high error rates of the small disjuncts. We conclude that the need for smaller disjuncts is a major reason that it is difficult to learn from errorful data in this domain.

Cite

Text

Danyluk and Provost. "Small Disjuncts in Action: Learning to Diagnose Errors in the Local Loop of the Telephone Network." International Conference on Machine Learning, 1993. doi:10.1016/B978-1-55860-307-3.50017-4

Markdown

[Danyluk and Provost. "Small Disjuncts in Action: Learning to Diagnose Errors in the Local Loop of the Telephone Network." International Conference on Machine Learning, 1993.](https://mlanthology.org/icml/1993/danyluk1993icml-small/) doi:10.1016/B978-1-55860-307-3.50017-4

BibTeX

@inproceedings{danyluk1993icml-small,
  title     = {{Small Disjuncts in Action: Learning to Diagnose Errors in the Local Loop of the Telephone Network}},
  author    = {Danyluk, Andrea Pohoreckyj and Provost, Foster J.},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {1993},
  pages     = {81-88},
  doi       = {10.1016/B978-1-55860-307-3.50017-4},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/icml/1993/danyluk1993icml-small/}
}