Learning constitutes one of the most important phase of the whole psychological processes and it is essential in many ways for the occurrence of necessary changes in the behavior of adjusting organisms. In a broad sense influence of prior behavior and its consequence upon subsequent behavior is usually accepted as a definition of learning. Till recently learning was regarded as the prerogative of living beings. But in the past few decades there have been attempts to construct learning machines or systems with considerable success. This book deals with a powerful class of learning algorithms that have been developed over the past two decades in the context of learning systems modelled by finite state probabilistic automaton. These algorithms are very simple iterative schemes. Mathematically these algorithms define two distinct classes of Markov processes with unit simplex (of suitable dimension) as its state space. The basic problem of learning is viewed as one of finding conditions on the algorithm such that the associated Markov process has prespecified asymptotic behavior. As a prerequisite a first course in analysis and stochastic processes would be an adequate preparation to pursue the development in various chapters.

Machine Learning Algorithms is for current and ambitious machine learning specialists looking to implement solutions to real-world machine learning problems. It talks entirely about the various applications of machine and deep learning techniques, with each chapter dealing with a novel approach of machine learning architecture for a specific application, and then compares the results with previous algorithms. The book discusses many methods based in different fields, including statistics, pattern recognition, neural networks, artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis, control, and data mining, in order to present a unified treatment of machine learning problems and solutions. All learning algorithms are explained so that the user can easily move from the equations in the book to a computer program.

This book is the result of several years of research trying to better characterize parallel genetic algorithms (pGAs) as a powerful tool for optimization, search, and learning. Readers can learn how to solve complex tasks by reducing their high computational times. Dealing with two scientific fields (parallelism and GAs) is always difficult, and the book seeks at gracefully introducing from basic concepts to advanced topics. The presentation is structured in three parts. The first one is targeted to the algorithms themselves, discussing their components, the physical parallelism, and best practices in using and evaluating them. A second part deals with the theory for pGAs, with an eye on theory-to-practice issues. A final third part offers a very wide study of pGAs as practical problem solvers, addressing domains such as natural language processing, circuits design, scheduling, and genomics. This volume will be helpful both for researchers and practitioners. The first part shows pGAs to either beginners and mature researchers looking for a unified view of the two fields: GAs and parallelism. The second part partially solves (and also opens) new investigation lines in theory of pGAs. The third part can be accessed independently for readers interested in applications. The result is an excellent source of information on the state of the art and future developments in parallel GAs.

This book reviews research developments in diverse areas of reinforcement learning such as model-free actor-critic methods, model-based learning and control, information geometry of policy searches, reward design, and exploration in biology and the behavioral sciences. Special emphasis is placed on advanced ideas, algorithms, methods, and applications. The contributed papers gathered here grew out of a lecture course on reinforcement learning held by Prof. Jan Peters in the winter semester 2018/2019 at Technische Universität Darmstadt. The book is intended for reinforcement learning students and researchers with a firm grasp of linear algebra, statistics, and optimization. Nevertheless, all key concepts are introduced in each chapter, making the content self-contained and accessible to a broader audience.

In his paper Theory of Communication [Gab46], D. Gabor proposed the use of a family of functions obtained from one Gaussian by time-and frequency shifts. Each of these is well concentrated in time and frequency; together they are meant to constitute a complete collection of building blocks into which more complicated time-depending functions can be decomposed. The application to communication proposed by Gabor was to send the coeffi cients of the decomposition into this family of a signal, rather than the signal itself. This remained a proposal-as far as I know there were no seri ous attempts to implement it for communication purposes in practice, and in fact, at the critical time-frequency density proposed originally, there is a mathematical obstruction; as was understood later, the family of shifted and modulated Gaussians spans the space of square integrable functions [BBGK71, Per71] (it even has one function to spare [BGZ75] . . . ) but it does not constitute what we now call a frame, leading to numerical insta bilities. The Balian-Low theorem (about which the reader can find more in some of the contributions in this book) and its extensions showed that a similar mishap occurs if the Gaussian is replaced by any other function that is "reasonably" smooth and localized. One is thus led naturally to considering a higher time-frequency density.

Introduces machine learning and its algorithmic paradigms, explaining the principles behind automated learning approaches and the considerations underlying their usage.

This book is a collection of the most recent approaches that combine metaheuristics and machine learning. Some of the methods considered in this book are evolutionary, swarm, machine learning, and deep learning. The chapters were classified based on the content; then, the sections are thematic. Different applications and implementations are included; in this sense, the book provides theory and practical content with novel machine learning and metaheuristic algorithms. The chapters were compiled using a scientific perspective. Accordingly, the book is primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Science, Engineering, and Computational Mathematics and is useful in courses on Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Machine Learning, among others. Likewise, the book is useful for research from the evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, and image processing communities.

This book targets an audience with a basic understanding of deep learning, its architectures, and its application in the multimedia domain. Background in machine learning is helpful in exploring various aspects of deep learning. Deep learning models have a major impact on multimedia research and raised the performance bar substantially in many of the standard evaluations. Moreover, new multi-modal challenges are tackled, which older systems would not have been able to handle. However, it is very difficult to comprehend, let alone guide, the process of learning in deep neural networks, there is an air of uncertainty about exactly what and how these networks learn. By the end of the book, the readers will have an understanding of different deep learning approaches, models, pre-trained models, and familiarity with the implementation of various deep learning algorithms using various frameworks and libraries.

The field of machine learning has matured to the point where many sophisticated learning approaches can be applied to practical applications. Thus it is of critical importance that researchers have the proper tools to evaluate learning approaches and understand the underlying issues. This book examines various aspects of the evaluation process with an emphasis on classification algorithms. The authors describe several techniques for classifier performance assessment, error estimation and resampling, obtaining statistical significance as well as selecting appropriate domains for evaluation. They also present a unified evaluation framework and highlight how different components of evaluation are both significantly interrelated and interdependent. The techniques presented in the book are illustrated using R and WEKA, facilitating better practical insight as well as implementation. Aimed at researchers in the theory and applications of machine learning, this book offers a solid basis for conducting performance evaluations of algorithms in practical settings.

Since the initial work on constrained clustering, there have been numerous advances in methods, applications, and our understanding of the theoretical properties of constraints and constrained clustering algorithms. Bringing these developments together, Constrained Clustering: Advances in Algorithms, Theory, and Applications presents an extensive collection of the latest innovations in clustering data analysis methods that use background knowledge encoded as constraints. Algorithms The first five chapters of this volume investigate advances in the use of instance-level, pairwise constraints for partitional and hierarchical clustering. The book then explores other types of constraints for clustering, including cluster size balancing, minimum cluster size,and cluster-level relational constraints. Theory It also describes variations of the traditional clustering under constraints problem as well as approximation algorithms with helpful performance guarantees. Applications The book ends by applying clustering with constraints to relational data, privacy-preserving data publishing, and video surveillance data. It discusses an interactive visual clustering approach, a distance metric learning approach, existential constraints, and automatically generated constraints. With contributions from industrial researchers and leading academic experts who pioneered the field, this volume delivers thorough coverage of the capabilities and limitations of constrained clustering methods as well as introduces new types of constraints and clustering algorithms.