Machine Learning Ecml 2006

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 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 thesis takes an empirical approach to understanding of the behavior and interactions between the two main components of reinforcement learning: the learning algorithm and the functional representation of learned knowledge. The author approaches these entities using design of experiments not commonly employed to study machine learning methods. The results outlined in this work provide insight as to what enables and what has an effect on successful reinforcement learning implementations so that this learning method can be applied to more challenging problems.

This comprehensive encyclopedia, in A-Z format, provides easy access to relevant information for those seeking entry into any aspect within the broad field of Machine Learning. Most of the entries in this preeminent work include useful literature references.

In ancient games such as chess or go, the most brilliant players can improve by studying the strategies produced by a machine. Robotic systems practice their own movements. In arcade games, agents capable of learning reach superhuman levels within a few hours. How do these spectacular reinforcement learning algorithms work? With easy-to-understand explanations and clear examples in Java and Greenfoot, you can acquire the principles of reinforcement learning and apply them in your own intelligent agents. Greenfoot (M.Kölling, King's College London) and the hamster model (D. Bohles, University of Oldenburg) are simple but also powerful didactic tools that were developed to convey basic programming concepts. The result is an accessible introduction into machine learning that concentrates on reinforcement learning. Taking the reader through the steps of developing intelligent agents, from the very basics to advanced aspects, touching on a variety of machine learning algorithms along the way, one is allowed to play along, experiment, and add their own ideas and experiments.

Reinforcement learning has developed as a successful learning approach for domains that are not fully understood and that are too complex to be described in closed form. However, reinforcement learning does not scale well to large and continuous problems. Furthermore, acquired knowledge specific to the learned task, and transfer of knowledge to new tasks is crucial. In this book the author investigates whether deficiencies of reinforcement learning can be overcome by suitable abstraction methods. He discusses various forms of spatial abstraction, in particular qualitative abstraction, a form of representing knowledge that has been thoroughly investigated and successfully applied in spatial cognition research. With his approach, he exploits spatial structures and structural similarity to support the learning process by abstracting from less important features and stressing the essential ones. The author demonstrates his learning approach and the transferability of knowledge by having his system learn in a virtual robot simulation system and consequently transfer the acquired knowledge to a physical robot. The approach is influenced by findings from cognitive science. The book is suitable for researchers working in artificial intelligence, in particular knowledge representation, learning, spatial cognition, and robotics.

Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize a numerical performance measure that expresses a long-term objective. What distinguishes reinforcement learning from supervised learning is that only partial feedback is given to the learner about the learner's predictions. Further, the predictions may have long term effects through influencing the future state of the controlled system. Thus, time plays a special role. The goal in reinforcement learning is to develop efficient learning algorithms, as well as to understand the algorithms' merits and limitations. Reinforcement learning is of great interest because of the large number of practical applications that it can be used to address, ranging from problems in artificial intelligence to operations research or control engineering. In this book, we focus on those algorithms of reinforcement learning that build on the powerful theory of dynamic programming. We give a fairly comprehensive catalog of learning problems, describe the core ideas, note a large number of state of the art algorithms, followed by the discussion of their theoretical properties and limitations. Table of Contents: Markov Decision Processes / Value Prediction Problems / Control / For Further Exploration

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.