This book presents revised reviewed versions of lectures given during the Machine Learning Summer School held in Canberra, Australia, in February 2002. The lectures address the following key topics in algorithmic learning: statistical learning theory, kernel methods, boosting, reinforcement learning, theory learning, association rule learning, and learning linear classifier systems. Thus, the book is well balanced between classical topics and new approaches in machine learning. Advanced students and lecturers will find this book a coherent in-depth overview of this exciting area, while researchers will use this book as a valuable source of reference.

State-of-the-art algorithms and theory in a novel domain of machine learning, prediction when the output has structure. Machine learning develops intelligent computer systems that are able to generalize from previously seen examples. A new domain of machine learning, in which the prediction must satisfy the additional constraints found in structured data, poses one of machine learning's greatest challenges: learning functional dependencies between arbitrary input and output domains. This volume presents and analyzes the state of the art in machine learning algorithms and theory in this novel field. The contributors discuss applications as diverse as machine translation, document markup, computational biology, and information extraction, among others, providing a timely overview of an exciting field. Contributors Yasemin Altun, Goekhan Bakir, Olivier Bousquet, Sumit Chopra, Corinna Cortes, Hal Daume III, Ofer Dekel, Zoubin Ghahramani, Raia Hadsell, Thomas Hofmann, Fu Jie Huang, Yann LeCun, Tobias Mann, Daniel Marcu, David McAllester, Mehryar Mohri, William Stafford Noble, Fernando Perez-Cruz, Massimiliano Pontil, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Juho Rousu, Craig Saunders, Bernhard Schoelkopf, Matthias W. Seeger, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, John Shawe-Taylor, Yoram Singer, Alexander J. Smola, Sandor Szedmak, Ben Taskar, Ioannis Tsochantaridis, S.V.N Vishwanathan, Jason Weston

A comprehensive introduction to Support Vector Machines and related kernel methods. In the 1990s, a new type of learning algorithm was developed, based on results from statistical learning theory: the Support Vector Machine (SVM). This gave rise to a new class of theoretically elegant learning machines that use a central concept of SVMs--kernels-for a number of learning tasks. Kernel machines provide a modular framework that can be adapted to different tasks and domains by the choice of the kernel function and the base algorithm. They are replacing neural networks in a variety of fields, including engineering, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. Learning with Kernels provides an introduction to SVMs and related kernel methods. Although the book begins with the basics, it also includes the latest research. It provides all of the concepts necessary to enable a reader equipped with some basic mathematical knowledge to enter the world of machine learning using theoretically well-founded yet easy-to-use kernel algorithms and to understand and apply the powerful algorithms that have been developed over the last few years.