Change of Representation and Inductive Bias One of the most important emerging concerns of machine learning researchers is the dependence of their learning programs on the underlying representations, especially on the languages used to describe hypotheses. The effectiveness of learning algorithms is very sensitive to this choice of language; choosing too large a language permits too many possible hypotheses for a program to consider, precluding effective learning, but choosing too small a language can prohibit a program from being able to find acceptable hypotheses. This dependence is not just a pitfall, however; it is also an opportunity. The work of Saul Amarel over the past two decades has demonstrated the effectiveness of representational shift as a problem-solving technique. An increasing number of machine learning researchers are building programs that learn to alter their language to improve their effectiveness. At the Fourth Machine Learning Workshop held in June, 1987, at the University of California at Irvine, it became clear that the both the machine learning community and the number of topics it addresses had grown so large that the representation issue could not be discussed in sufficient depth. A number of attendees were particularly interested in the related topics of constructive induction, problem reformulation, representation selection, and multiple levels of abstraction. Rob Holte, Larry Rendell, and I decided to hold a workshop in 1988 to discuss these topics. To keep this workshop small, we decided that participation be by invitation only.

"An overview of the multidisciplinary field of data mining, this book focuses specifically on new methodologies and case studies. Included are case studies written by 44 leading scientists and talented young scholars from seven different countries. Topics covered include data mining based on rough sets, the impact of missing data, and mining free text for structure. In addition, the four basic mining operations supported by numerous mining techniques are addressed: predictive model creation supported by supervised induction techniques; link analysis supported by association discovery and sequence discovery techniques; DB segmentation supported by clustering techniques; and deviation detection supported by statistical techniques."

This book presents four contributions to planning research within an integrated framework. James Allen offers a survey of his research in the field of temporal reasoning, and then describes a planning system formalized and implemented directly as an inference process in the temporal logic. Starting from the same logic, Henry Kautz develops the first formal specification of the plan recognition process and develops a powerful family of algorithms for plan recognition in complex situations. Richard Pelavin then extends the temporal logic with model operators that allow the representation to support reasoning about complex planning situations involving simultaneous interacting actions, and interaction with external events. Finally, Josh Tenenberg introduces two different formalisms of abstraction in planning systems and explores the properties of these abstraction techniques in depth.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Eighth European Conference on Machine Learning ECML-95, held in Heraclion, Crete in April 1995. Besides four invited papers the volume presents revised versions of 14 long papers and 26 short papers selected from a total of 104 submissions. The papers address all current aspects in the area of machine learning; also logic programming, planning, reasoning, and algorithmic issues are touched upon.

This is a subject that is as hot as a snake in a wagon rut, offering as it does huge potentiality in the field of computer programming. That’s why this book, which constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation, held in Whistler, Canada, in July 2007, will undoubtedly prove so popular among researchers and professionals in relevant fields. 26 revised full papers are presented, together with the abstracts of 3 invited papers and 13 research summaries.

Machine Learning