---
title: "Practical PAC Learning"
authors:
  - "Dale Schuurmans"
  - "Russell Greiner"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/151"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/0151.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1995
pages: "1169-1176"
track: "Learning"
keywords:
---

# Practical PAC Learning

Dale Schuurmans, Russell Greiner

*Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1169-1176.

## Abstract

We present new strategies for "probably approximately correct" (pac) learning that use fewer training examples than previous approaches. The idea is to observe training examples one-at-a-time and decide "on-line" when to return a hypothesis, rather than collect a large fixed-size training sample. This yields sequential learning procedures that pac-learn by observing a small random number of examples. We provide theoretical bounds on the expected training sample size of our procedure - but establish its efficiency primarily by a series of experiments which show sequential learning actually uses many times fewer training examples in practice. These results demonstrate that paclearning can be far more efficiently achieved in practice than previously thought.