Machine Learning is one of the oldest and most intriguing areas of Ar tificial Intelligence. From the moment that computer visionaries first began to conceive the potential for general-purpose symbolic computa tion, the concept of a machine that could learn by itself has been an ever present goal. Today, although there have been many implemented com puter programs that can be said to learn, we are still far from achieving the lofty visions of self-organizing automata that spring to mind when we think of machine learning. We have established some base camps and scaled some of the foothills of this epic intellectual adventure, but we are still far from the lofty peaks that the imagination conjures up. Nevertheless, a solid foundation of theory and technique has begun to develop around a variety of specialized learning tasks. Such tasks in clude discovery of optimal or effective parameter settings for controlling processes, automatic acquisition or refinement of rules for controlling behavior in rule-driven systems, and automatic classification and di agnosis of items on the basis of their features. Contributions include algorithms for optimal parameter estimation, feedback and adaptation algorithms, strategies for credit/blame assignment, techniques for rule and category acquisition, theoretical results dealing with learnability of various classes by formal automata, and empirical investigations of the abilities of many different learning algorithms in a diversity of applica tion areas.

The biennial European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) series is intended to provide an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality research results in machine learning and is the major European scienti?c event in the ?eld. The eleventh conference (ECML 2000) held in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain from May 31 to June 2, 2000, has continued this tradition by attracting high quality papers from around the world. Scientists from 21 countries submitted 100 papers to ECML 2000, from which 20 were selected for long oral presentations and 23 for short oral presentations. This selection was based on the recommendations of at least two reviewers for each submitted paper. It is worth noticing that the number of papers reporting applications of machine learning has increased in comparison to past ECML conferences. We believe this fact shows the growing maturity of the ?eld. This volume contains the 43 accepted papers as well as the invited talks by Katharina Morik from the University of Dortmund and Pedro Domingos from the University of Washington at Seattle. In addition, three workshops were jointly organized by ECML 2000 and the European Network of Excellence - net: “Dealing with Structured Data in Machine Learning and Statistics W- stites”, “Machine Learning in the New Information Age” , and “Meta-Learning: Building Automatic Advice Strategies for Model Selection and Method Com- nation”.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems, HAIS 2016, held in Seville, Spain, in April 2016. The 63 full papers published in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on data mining and knowledge discovery; time series; bio-inspired models and evolutionary computation; learning algorithms; video and image; classification and cluster analysis; applications; bioinformatics; and hybrid intelligent systems for data mining and applications.

Data Mining, Second Edition, describes data mining techniques and shows how they work. The book is a major revision of the first edition that appeared in 1999. While the basic core remains the same, it has been updated to reflect the changes that have taken place over five years, and now has nearly double the references. The highlights of this new edition include thirty new technique sections; an enhanced Weka machine learning workbench, which now features an interactive interface; comprehensive information on neural networks; a new section on Bayesian networks; and much more. This text is designed for information systems practitioners, programmers, consultants, developers, information technology managers, specification writers as well as professors and students of graduate-level data mining and machine learning courses. - Algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining—including tried and true techniques as well as leading edge methods - Performance improvement techniques that work by transforming the input or output

Intelligent Integration of Information presents a collection of chapters bringing the science of intelligent integration forward. The focus on integration defines tasks that increase the value of information when information from multiple sources is accessed, related, and combined. This contributed volume has also been published as a special double issue of the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), Volume 6:2/3.

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 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) is a leading international conference in the area of data mining and knowledge discovery. It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and automatic scientific discovery, data visualization, causality induction, and knowledge-based systems. This year’s conference (PAKDD 2005) was the ninth of the PAKDD series, and carried the tradition in providing high-quality technical programs to facilitate research in knowledge discovery and data mining. It was held in Hanoi, Vietnam at the Melia Hotel, 18–20 May 2005. We are pleased to provide some statistics about PAKDD 2005. This year we received 327 submissions (a 37% increase over PAKDD 2004), which is the highest number of submissions since the first PAKDD in 1997) from 28 countries/regions: Australia (33), Austria (1), Belgium (2), Canada (11), China (91), Switzerland (2), France (9), Finland (1), Germany (5), Hong Kong (11), Indonesia (1), India (2), Italy (2), Japan (21), Korea (51), Malaysia (1), Macau (1), New Zealand (3), Poland (4), Pakistan (1), Portugal (3), Singapore (12), Taiwan (19), Thailand (7), Tunisia (2), UK (5), USA (31), and Vietnam (9). The submitted papers went through a rigorous reviewing process. Each submission was reviewed by at least two reviewers, and most of them by three or four reviewers.

Rule-Based Programming is a broad presentation of the rule-based programming method with many example programs showing the strengths of the rule-based approach. The rule-based approach has been used extensively in the development of artificial intelligence systems, such as expert systems and machine learning. This rule-based programming technique has been applied in such diverse fields as medical diagnostic systems, insurance and banking systems, as well as automated design and configuration systems. Rule-based programming is also helpful in bridging the semantic gap between an application and a program, allowing domain specialists to understand programs and participate more closely in their development. Over sixty programs are presented and all programs are available from an ftp site. Many of these programs are presented in several versions allowing the reader to see how realistic programs are elaborated from `back of envelope' models. Metaprogramming is also presented as a technique for bridging the `semantic gap'. Rule-Based Programming will be of interest to programmers, systems analysts and other developers of expert systems as well as to researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence, computer science professionals and educators.

An Introduction to Fuzzy Logic Applications in Intelligent Systems consists of a collection of chapters written by leading experts in the field of fuzzy sets. Each chapter addresses an area where fuzzy sets have been applied to situations broadly related to intelligent systems. The volume provides an introduction to and an overview of recent applications of fuzzy sets to various areas of intelligent systems. Its purpose is to provide information and easy access for people new to the field. The book also serves as an excellent reference for researchers in the field and those working in the specifics of systems development. People in computer science, especially those in artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, and intelligent systems will find this to be a valuable sourcebook. Engineers, particularly control engineers, will also have a strong interest in this book. Finally, the book will be of interest to researchers working in decision support systems, operations research, decision theory, management science and applied mathematics. An Introduction to Fuzzy Logic Applications in Intelligent Systems may also be used as an introductory text and, as such, it is tutorial in nature.

Generating Abstraction Hierarchies presents a completely automated approach to generating abstractions for problem solving. The abstractions are generated using a tractable, domain-independent algorithm whose only inputs are the definition of a problem space and the problem to be solved and whose output is an abstraction hierarchy that is tailored to the particular problem. The algorithm generates abstraction hierarchies that satisfy the `ordered monotonicity' property, which guarantees that the structure of an abstract solution is not changed in the process of refining it. An abstraction hierarchy with this property allows a problem to be decomposed such that the solution in an abstract space can be held invariant while the remaining parts of a problem are solved. The algorithm for generating abstractions is implemented in a system called ALPINE, which generates abstractions for a hierarchical version of the PRODIGY problem solver. Generating Abstraction Hierarchies formally defines this hierarchical problem solving method, shows that under certain assumptions this method can reduce the size of a search space from exponential to linear in the solution size, and describes the implementation of this method in PRODIGY. The abstractions generated by ALPINE are tested in multiple domains on large problem sets and are shown to produce shorter solutions with significantly less search than problem solving without using abstraction. Generating Abstraction Hierarchies will be of interest to researchers in machine learning, planning and problem reformation.