This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2004, held in Pisa, Italy, in September 2004, jointly with PKDD 2004. The 45 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with abstracts of 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 280 papers submitted to ECML and 107 papers submitted to both, ECML and PKDD. The papers present a wealth of new results in the area and address all current issues in machine learning.

The proceedings of ECML/PKDD 2004 are published in two separate, albeit - tertwined,volumes:theProceedingsofthe 15thEuropeanConferenceonMac- ne Learning (LNAI 3201) and the Proceedings of the 8th European Conferences on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 3202). The two conferences were co-located in Pisa, Tuscany, Italy during September 20–24, 2004. It was the fourth time in a row that ECML and PKDD were co-located. - ter the successful co-locations in Freiburg (2001), Helsinki (2002), and Cavtat- Dubrovnik (2003), it became clear that researchersstrongly supported the or- nization of a major scienti?c event about machine learning and data mining in Europe. We are happy to provide some statistics about the conferences. 581 di?erent papers were submitted to ECML/PKDD (about a 75% increase over 2003); 280 weresubmittedtoECML2004only,194weresubmittedtoPKDD2004only,and 107weresubmitted to both.Aroundhalfofthe authorsforsubmitted papersare from outside Europe, which is a clear indicator of the increasing attractiveness of ECML/PKDD. The Program Committee members were deeply involved in what turned out to be a highly competitive selection process. We assigned each paper to 3 - viewers, deciding on the appropriate PC for papers submitted to both ECML and PKDD. As a result, ECML PC members reviewed 312 papers and PKDD PC members reviewed 269 papers. We accepted for publication regular papers (45 for ECML 2004 and 39 for PKDD 2004) and short papers that were as- ciated with poster presentations (6 for ECML 2004 and 9 for PKDD 2004). The globalacceptance ratewas14.5%for regular papers(17% if we include the short papers).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2006, held, jointly with PKDD 2006. The book presents 46 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers together with abstracts of 5 invited talks, carefully reviewed and selected from 564 papers submitted. The papers present a wealth of new results in the area and address all current issues in machine learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2007, held in Warsaw, Poland, September 2007, jointly with PKDD 2007. The 41 revised full papers and 37 revised short papers presented together with abstracts of four invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 592 abstracts submitted to both, ECML and PKDD. The papers present a wealth of new results in the area and address all current issues in machine learning.

Processing multimedia content has emerged as a key area for the application of machine learning techniques, where the objectives are to provide insight into the domain from which the data is drawn, and to organize that data and improve the performance of the processes manipulating it. Arising from the EU MUSCLE network, this multidisciplinary book provides a comprehensive coverage of the most important machine learning techniques used and their application in this domain.

This book presents machine learning models and algorithms to address big data classification problems. Existing machine learning techniques like the decision tree (a hierarchical approach), random forest (an ensemble hierarchical approach), and deep learning (a layered approach) are highly suitable for the system that can handle such problems. This book helps readers, especially students and newcomers to the field of big data and machine learning, to gain a quick understanding of the techniques and technologies; therefore, the theory, examples, and programs (Matlab and R) presented in this book have been simplified, hardcoded, repeated, or spaced for improvements. They provide vehicles to test and understand the complicated concepts of various topics in the field. It is expected that the readers adopt these programs to experiment with the examples, and then modify or write their own programs toward advancing their knowledge for solving more complex and challenging problems. The presentation format of this book focuses on simplicity, readability, and dependability so that both undergraduate and graduate students as well as new researchers, developers, and practitioners in this field can easily trust and grasp the concepts, and learn them effectively. It has been written to reduce the mathematical complexity and help the vast majority of readers to understand the topics and get interested in the field. This book consists of four parts, with the total of 14 chapters. The first part mainly focuses on the topics that are needed to help analyze and understand data and big data. The second part covers the topics that can explain the systems required for processing big data. The third part presents the topics required to understand and select machine learning techniques to classify big data. Finally, the fourth part concentrates on the topics that explain the scaling-up machine learning, an important solution for modern big data problems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing 2007, held in Mexico City, Mexico in February 2007. The 53 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers cover all current issues in computational linguistics research and present intelligent text processing applications.