AI engineering glossary · ML fundamentals
What is online learning?
Online learning (also called Incremental learning): Training in which the model is updated continuously as new examples arrive, one at a time or in small groups, rather than being retrained from scratch on a fixed dataset. It suits streams of data and changing environments.
Online learning: an example
A news recommender adjusts its parameters after each click instead of waiting for a nightly full retrain.
Related terms
- Batch learning
- Concept drift
- Training
- Inference
More ML fundamentals terms
- Out-of-distribution
- Outlier
- Overfitting
- Overparameterisation
- PAC learning
- Parameter
- Parametric model
- Pipeline
Where you learn it
Online learning is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.