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.

The topic of preferences is a new branch of machine learning and data mining, and it has attracted considerable attention in artificial intelligence research in previous years. It involves learning from observations that reveal information about the preferences of an individual or a class of individuals. Representing and processing knowledge in terms of preferences is appealing as it allows one to specify desires in a declarative way, to combine qualitative and quantitative modes of reasoning, and to deal with inconsistencies and exceptions in a flexible manner. And, generalizing beyond training data, models thus learned may be used for preference prediction. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and the treatment is comprehensive. The editors first offer a thorough introduction, including a systematic categorization according to learning task and learning technique, along with a unified notation. The first half of the book is organized into parts on label ranking, instance ranking, and object ranking; while the second half is organized into parts on applications of preference learning in multiattribute domains, information retrieval, and recommender systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning and data mining, and in fields such as multicriteria decision-making and operations research.

Computational Intelligence (CI) community has developed hundreds of algorithms for intelligent data analysis, but still many hard problems in computer vision, signal processing or text and multimedia understanding, problems that require deep learning techniques, are open. Modern data mining packages contain numerous modules for data acquisition, pre-processing, feature selection and construction, instance selection, classification, association and approximation methods, optimization techniques, pattern discovery, clusterization, visualization and post-processing. A large data mining package allows for billions of ways in which these modules can be combined. No human expert can claim to explore and understand all possibilities in the knowledge discovery process. This is where algorithms that learn how to learnl come to rescue. Operating in the space of all available data transformations and optimization techniques these algorithms use meta-knowledge about learning processes automatically extracted from experience of solving diverse problems. Inferences about transformations useful in different contexts help to construct learning algorithms that can uncover various aspects of knowledge hidden in the data. Meta-learning shifts the focus of the whole CI field from individual learning algorithms to the higher level of learning how to learn. This book defines and reveals new theoretical and practical trends in meta-learning, inspiring the readers to further research in this exciting field.

This volume comprises papers dedicated to data science and the extraction of knowledge from many types of data: structural, quantitative, or statistical approaches for the analysis of data; advances in classification, clustering and pattern recognition methods; strategies for modeling complex data and mining large data sets; applications of advanced methods in specific domains of practice. The contributions offer interesting applications to various disciplines such as psychology, biology, medical and health sciences; economics, marketing, banking and finance; engineering; geography and geology; archeology, sociology, educational sciences, linguistics and musicology; library science. The book contains the selected and peer-reviewed papers presented during the European Conference on Data Analysis (ECDA 2013) which was jointly held by the German Classification Society (GfKl) and the French-speaking Classification Society (SFC) in July 2013 at the University of Luxembourg.

This book organizes key concepts, theories, standards, methodologies, trends, challenges and applications of data mining and knowledge discovery in databases. It first surveys, then provides comprehensive yet concise algorithmic descriptions of methods, including classic methods plus the extensions and novel methods developed recently. It also gives in-depth descriptions of data mining applications in various interdisciplinary industries.

This book offers a comprehensive review of multilabel techniques widely used to classify and label texts, pictures, videos and music in the Internet. A deep review of the specialized literature on the field includes the available software needed to work with this kind of data. It provides the user with the software tools needed to deal with multilabel data, as well as step by step instruction on how to use them. The main topics covered are: • The special characteristics of multi-labeled data and the metrics available to measure them.• The importance of taking advantage of label correlations to improve the results.• The different approaches followed to face multi-label classification.• The preprocessing techniques applicable to multi-label datasets.• The available software tools to work with multi-label data. This book is beneficial for professionals and researchers in a variety of fields because of the wide range of potential applications for multilabel classification. Besides its multiple applications to classify different types of online information, it is also useful in many other areas, such as genomics and biology. No previous knowledge about the subject is required. The book introduces all the needed concepts to understand multilabel data characterization, treatment and evaluation.

Delivering the desired benefits from using information technology in healthcare requires a high degree of data standardization, effective governance and semantic interoperability between systems in the health industry. Corporate chief executive officers (CEOs) and company boards need to be more aware of their governance responsibility. This publication explains these concepts to assist the reader to collaboratively work with others to meet these challenges. With contributions from internationally distinguished authors, this book is a valuable cutting edge resource for anyone working in or for the health industry today and especially for: • Policy and decision makers, • Healthcare professionals, • Health information managers, • Health informaticians and • ICT professionals about: • Data governance. • Semantic interoperability • IT in health care • Information security governance The book is suitable for use as a basic text or reference supporting professional, undergraduate and postgraduate curricula preparing students for practice as health or IT professionals working in today's healthcare system.

Reinforcement learning encompasses both a science of adaptive behavior of rational beings in uncertain environments and a computational methodology for finding optimal behaviors for challenging problems in control, optimization and adaptive behavior of intelligent agents. As a field, reinforcement learning has progressed tremendously in the past decade. The main goal of this book is to present an up-to-date series of survey articles on the main contemporary sub-fields of reinforcement learning. This includes surveys on partially observable environments, hierarchical task decompositions, relational knowledge representation and predictive state representations. Furthermore, topics such as transfer, evolutionary methods and continuous spaces in reinforcement learning are surveyed. In addition, several chapters review reinforcement learning methods in robotics, in games, and in computational neuroscience. In total seventeen different subfields are presented by mostly young experts in those areas, and together they truly represent a state-of-the-art of current reinforcement learning research. Marco Wiering works at the artificial intelligence department of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on various reinforcement learning topics. Martijn van Otterlo works in the cognitive artificial intelligence group at the Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. He has mainly focused on expressive knowledge representation in reinforcement learning settings.

This three-volume set LNAI 6911, LNAI 6912, and LNAI 6913 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2011, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2011. The 121 revised full papers presented together with 10 invited talks and 11 demos in the three volumes, were carefully reviewed and selected from about 600 paper submissions. The papers address all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases as well as other innovative application domains such as supervised and unsupervised learning with some innovative contributions in fundamental issues; dimensionality reduction, distance and similarity learning, model learning and matrix/tensor analysis; graph mining, graphical models, hidden markov models, kernel methods, active and ensemble learning, semi-supervised and transductive learning, mining sparse representations, model learning, inductive logic programming, and statistical learning. a significant part of the papers covers novel and timely applications of data mining and machine learning in industrial domains.