Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
This paper presents a survey of machine induction, studied mainly from the field of artificial intelligence, but also from the fields of pattern recognition and cognitive psychology. The paper consists of two parts: Part I discusses the basic principles and features of the machine induction process; Part II uses these principles and features to review and criticize the major supervised attribute-based induction methods. Attribute-based induction has been chosen because it is the most commonly used inductive approach in the development of expert systems and pattern recognition models.