This volume of Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing contains accepted papers presented at SOCO 2014, CISIS 2014 and ICEUTE 2014, all conferences held in the beautiful and historic city of Bilbao (Spain), in June 2014. Soft computing represents a collection or set of computational techniques in machine learning, computer science and some engineering disciplines, which investigate, simulate, and analyze very complex issues and phenomena.

After a through peer-review process, the 9th SOCO 2014 International Program Committee selected 31 papers which are published in these conference proceedings. In this relevant edition a special emphasis was put on the organization of special sessions. One special session was organized related to relevant topics as: Soft Computing Methods in Manufacturing and Management Systems.

The aim of the 7th CISIS 2014 conference is to offer a meeting opportunity for academic and industry-related researchers belonging to the various, vast communities of Computational Intelligence, Information Security, and Data Mining. The need for intelligent, flexible behaviour by large, complex systems, especially in mission-critical domains, is intended to be the catalyst and the aggregation stimulus for the overall event.

After a through peer-review process, the CISIS 2014 International Program Committee selected 23 papers and the 5th ICEUTE 2014 International Program Committee selected 2 papers which are published in these conference proceedings as well."

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems, HAIS 2014, held in Salamanca, Spain, in June 2014. The 61 papers published in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 199 submissions. They are organized in topical sessions on HAIS applications; data mining and knowledge discovery; video and image analysis; bio-inspired models and evolutionary computation; learning algorithms; hybrid intelligent systems for data mining and applications and classification and cluster analysis.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems, HAIS 2013, held in Salamanca, Spain, in September 2013. The 68 papers published in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 218 submissions. They are organized in topical sessions on Agents and Multi Agents Systems; HAIS Applications; Classification and Cluster Analysis; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Video and Image Analysis; Bio-inspired Models and Evolutionary Computation; Learning Algorithms; Systems, MAN, and Cybernetics; Hybrid Intelligent Systems for Data Mining and Applications; Metaheuristics for Combinatorial Optimization and Modelling Complex Systems.

This volume of Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing contains accepted papers presented at SOCO 2013, CISIS 2013 and ICEUTE 2013, all conferences held in the beautiful and historic city of Salamanca (Spain), in September 2013. Soft computing represents a collection or set of computational techniques in machine learning, computer science and some engineering disciplines, which investigate, simulate, and analyze very complex issues and phenomena. After a through peer-review process, the 8th SOCO 2013 International Program Committee selected 40 papers which are published in these conference proceedings, and represents an acceptance rate of 41%. In this relevant edition a special emphasis was put on the organization of special sessions. Four special sessions were organized related to relevant topics as: Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Data Mining for Industrial and Environmental Applications, Soft Computing Methods in Bioinformatics, and Soft Computing Methods, Modelling and Simulation in Electrical Engineer. The aim of the 6th CISIS 2013 conference is to offer a meeting opportunity for academic and industry-related researchers belonging to the various, vast communities of Computational Intelligence, Information Security, and Data Mining. The need for intelligent, flexible behaviour by large, complex systems, especially in mission-critical domains, is intended to be the catalyst and the aggregation stimulus for the overall event. After a through peer-review process, the CISIS 2013 International Program Committee selected 23 papers which are published in these conference proceedings achieving an acceptance rate of 39%. In the case of 4th ICEUTE 2013, the International Program Committee selected 11 papers which are published in these conference proceedings. The selection of papers was extremely rigorous in order to maintain the high quality of the conference and we would like to thank the members of the Program Committees for their hard work in the reviewing process. This is a crucial process to the creation of a high standard conference and the SOCO, CISIS and ICEUTE conferences would not exist without their help.

Presents a detailed study of the major design components that constitute a top-down decision-tree induction algorithm, including aspects such as split criteria, stopping criteria, pruning and the approaches for dealing with missing values. Whereas the strategy still employed nowadays is to use a 'generic' decision-tree induction algorithm regardless of the data, the authors argue on the benefits that a bias-fitting strategy could bring to decision-tree induction, in which the ultimate goal is the automatic generation of a decision-tree induction algorithm tailored to the application domain of interest. For such, they discuss how one can effectively discover the most suitable set of components of decision-tree induction algorithms to deal with a wide variety of applications through the paradigm of evolutionary computation, following the emergence of a novel field called hyper-heuristics. "Automatic Design of Decision-Tree Induction Algorithms" would be highly useful for machine learning and evolutionary computation students and researchers alike.