This book constitutes the refereed preceedings of the 13th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2002, held in Helsinki, Finland in August 2002. The 41 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Among the topics covered are computational discovery, search strategies, Classification, support vector machines, kernel methods, rule induction, linear learning, decision tree learning, boosting, collaborative learning, statistical learning, clustering, instance-based learning, reinforcement learning, multiagent learning, multirelational learning, Markov decision processes, active learning, etc.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2003, held in Cavtat-Dubrovnik, Croatia in September 2003 in conjunction with PKDD 2003. The 40 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and, together with another 40 ones for PKDD 2003, selected from a total of 332 submissions. The papers address all current issues in machine learning including support vector machine, inductive inference, feature selection algorithms, reinforcement learning, preference learning, probabilistic grammatical inference, decision tree learning, clustering, classification, agent learning, Markov networks, boosting, statistical parsing, Bayesian learning, supervised learning, and multi-instance learning.

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 European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) and the European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) were jointly organized this year for the ?fth time in a row, after some years of mutual independence before. After Freiburg (2001), Helsinki (2002), Cavtat (2003) and Pisa (2004), Porto received the 16th edition of ECML and the 9th PKDD in October 3–7. Having the two conferences together seems to be working well: 585 di?erent paper submissions were received for both events, which maintains the high s- mission standard of last year. Of these, 335 were submitted to ECML only, 220 to PKDD only and 30 to both. Such a high volume of scienti?c work required a tremendous e?ort from Area Chairs, Program Committee members and some additional reviewers. On average, PC members had 10 papers to evaluate, and Area Chairs had 25 papers to decide upon. We managed to have 3 highly qua- ?edindependentreviewsperpaper(withveryfewexceptions)andoneadditional overall input from one of the Area Chairs. After the authors’ responses and the online discussions for many of the papers, we arrived at the ?nal selection of 40 regular papers for ECML and 35 for PKDD. Besides these, 32 others were accepted as short papers for ECML and 35 for PKDD. This represents a joint acceptance rate of around 13% for regular papers and 25% overall. We thank all involved for all the e?ort with reviewing and selection of papers. Besidesthecoretechnicalprogram,ECMLandPKDDhad6invitedspeakers, 10 workshops, 8 tutorials and a Knowledge Discovery Challenge.

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.

The goal of this book is to present the latest applications of machine learning, which mainly include: speech recognition, traffic and fault classification, surface quality prediction in laser machining, network security and bioinformatics, enterprise credit risk evaluation, and so on. This book will be of interest to industrial engineers and scientists as well as academics who wish to pursue machine learning. The book is intended for both graduate and postgraduate students in fields such as computer science, cybernetics, system sciences, engineering, statistics, and social sciences, and as a reference for software professionals and practitioners. The wide scope of the book provides them with a good introduction to many application researches of machine learning, and it is also the source of useful bibliographical information.

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.

This book and its sister volume, LNAI 3613 and 3614, constitute the proce- ings of the Second International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD 2005), jointly held with the First International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC 2005, LNCS 3610, 3611, and 3612) from - gust 27–29, 2005 in Changsha, Hunan, China. FSKD 2005 successfully attracted 1249 submissions from 32 countries/regions (the joint ICNC-FSKD 2005 received 3136 submissions). After rigorous reviews, 333 high-quality papers, i. e. , 206 long papers and 127 short papers, were included in the FSKD 2005 proceedings, r- resenting an acceptance rate of 26. 7%. The ICNC-FSKD 2005 conference featured the most up-to-date research - sults in computational algorithms inspired from nature, including biological, e- logical, and physical systems. It is an exciting and emerging interdisciplinary area in which a wide range of techniques and methods are being studied for dealing with large, complex, and dynamic problems. The joint conferences also promoted cross-fertilization over these exciting and yet closely-related areas, which had a signi?cant impact on the advancement of these important technologies. Speci?c areas included computation with words, fuzzy computation, granular com- tation, neural computation, quantum computation, evolutionary computation, DNA computation, chemical computation, information processing in cells and tissues, molecular computation, arti?cial life, swarm intelligence, ants colony, arti?cial immune systems, etc. , with innovative applications to knowledge d- covery, ?nance, operations research, and more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, ISMIS 2006. The book presents 81 revised papers together with 3 invited papers. Topical sections include active media human-computer interaction, computational intelligence, intelligent agent technology, intelligent information retrieval, intelligent information systems, knowledge representation and integration, knowledge discovery and data mining, logic for AI and logic programming, machine learning, text mining, and Web intelligence.