Imaging that you’ve to tell which type an animal is: is it a bird, a mammal or a reptile? How do you do that? I bet you’ll look at percepts/ properties of the animal to decide: whether the animal has feather or not, whether the animal is warm-blooded or cold-blooded… There are $latex 2^n $ properties combination available, hence there are $latex 2^n $ actions/ decision we can make from those properties.

Formality of concepts:

The more formal a concept is, the more strictly/ explicitly defined it is. Example: Right Angle > Reptitle > Foo > Holiday > Inspirational > Saltiness

Axiomatic Concepts

Conceps that are well-defined as list of necessary and sufficient conditions, such as a Circle: set of point have length R from a center point.

Prototype Concepts

Base concepts defined by a typical example with override properties. Ex: A chair with 3 legs, without back

Exemplar concepts:

Defined by abstraction of instances or exemplars of the concept. Ex: beauty, defined by beauty of a scene, a figure… This don’t even have typical definition.

Top-down classification:

This is use when we have some properties that can differentiate concepts right away. For example, has wing or not can define whether the animal is a bird or a reptile.

Bottom up classification

Look at the nodes properties and abstract it in a bottom-up manner. Useful for things like predict the stock market.

This is an ongoing series of posts where I try to learn a concept by writing blog post about it. The screen shots from this post is taken from the KBAI course in Udacity.