Sequential Methods in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

This is the first textbook on pattern recognition to present the Bayesian viewpoint. The book presents approximate inference algorithms that permit fast approximate answers in situations where exact answers are not feasible. It uses graphical models to describe probability distributions when no other books apply graphical models to machine learning. No previous knowledge of pattern recognition or machine learning concepts is assumed. Familiarity with multivariate calculus and basic linear algebra is required, and some experience in the use of probabilities would be helpful though not essential as the book includes a self-contained introduction to basic probability theory.

This volume contains a revised collection of papers originally presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics in 1995. The topics represented in this volume are diverse, and include natural language application causality and graphical models, classification, learning, knowledge discovery, and exploratory data analysis. The chapters illustrate the rich possibilities for interdisciplinary study at the interface of artificial intelligence and statistics. The chapters vary in the background that they assume, but moderate familiarity with techniques of artificial intelligence and statistics is desirable in most cases.

This book contains the Proceedings of the US-Japan Seminar on Learning Process in Control Systems. The seminar, held in Nagoya, Japan, from August 18 to 20, 1970, was sponsored by the US-Japan Cooperative Science Program, jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The full texts of all the presented papers except two t are included. The papers cover a great variety of topics related to learning processes and systems, ranging from pattern recognition to systems identification, from learning control to biological modelling. In order to reflect the actual content of the book, the present title was selected. All the twenty-eight papers are roughly divided into two parts--Pattern Recognition and System Identification and Learning Process and Learning Control. It is sometimes quite obvious that some papers can be classified into either part. The choice in these cases was strictly the editor's in order to keep a certain balance between the two parts. During the past decade there has been a considerable growth of interest in problems of pattern recognition and machine learn ing. In designing an optimal pattern recognition or control system, if all the a priori information about the process under study is known and can be described deterministically, the optimal system is usually designed by deterministic optimization techniques.