ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I describe the theory-driven learning (TDL) process in Occam. A theory that relates potential causes and their effects can focus the attention of a learner so that a small number of examples are necessary to learn a causal relationship. Theory-driven learning lies somewhere between explanation-based and similarity-based learning. Like EBL, the goal of theory-driven learning is to improve upon SBL that requires a large number of examples to arrive at a correct hypothesis. However, like SBL, TDL does not share the principle shortcoming of EBL, since TDL learning mechanism can acquire new causal knowledge that is not a logical consequence of existing knowledge.
