This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third European Conference on Computational Learning Theory, EuroCOLT'97, held in Jerusalem, Israel, in March 1997.
The book presents 25 revised full papers carefully selected from a total of 36 high-quality submissions. The volume spans the whole spectrum of computational learning theory, with a certain emphasis on mathematical models of machine learning. Among the topics addressed are machine learning, neural nets, statistics, inductive inference, computational complexity, information theory, and theoretical physics.

Machine learning is one of the fastest growing areas of computer science, with far-reaching applications. The aim of this textbook is to introduce machine learning, and the algorithmic paradigms it offers, in a principled way. The book provides an extensive theoretical account of the fundamental ideas underlying machine learning and the mathematical derivations that transform these principles into practical algorithms. Following a presentation of the basics of the field, the book covers a wide array of central topics that have not been addressed by previous textbooks. These include a discussion of the computational complexity of learning and the concepts of convexity and stability; important algorithmic paradigms including stochastic gradient descent, neural networks, and structured output learning; and emerging theoretical concepts such as the PAC-Bayes approach and compression-based bounds. Designed for an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course, the text makes the fundamentals and algorithms of machine learning accessible to students and non-expert readers in statistics, computer science, mathematics, and engineering.