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 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 16th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2005, jointly held with PKDD 2005 in Porto, Portugal, in October 2005. The 40 revised full papers and 32 revised short papers presented together with abstracts of 6 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 335 papers submitted to ECML and 30 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.

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 12th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2001, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 2001. The 50 revised full papers presented together with four invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 140 submissions. Among the topics covered are classifier systems, naive-Bayes classification, rule learning, decision tree-based classification, Web mining, equation discovery, inductive logic programming, text categorization, agent learning, backpropagation, reinforcement learning, sequence prediction, sequential decisions, classification learning, sampling, and semi-supervised learning.