A Perspective View and Survey of Meta-Learning

Abstract

Different researchers hold different views of what the term meta-learning exactlymeans. The first part of this paper provides our own perspective view in which the goal isto build self-adaptive learners (i.e. learning algorithms that improve their bias dynamicallythrough experience by accumulating meta-knowledge). The second part provides a survey ofmeta-learning as reported by the machine-learning literature. We find that, despite differentviews and research lines, a question remains constant: how can we exploit knowledge aboutlearning (i.e. meta-knowledge) to improve the performance of learning algorithms? Clearlythe answer to this question is key to the advancement of the field and continues being thesubject of intensive research.