José L. Balcázar - Böcker

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, ALT 2006, held in Barcelona, Spain in October 2006, colocated with the 9th International Conference on Discovery Science, DS 2006. The 24 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of five invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers are dedicated to the theoretical foundations of machine learning.

The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2010, was held in Barcelona, September 20-24, 2010, consolidating the long junction between the European Conference on Machine Learning (of which the ?rst instance as European wo- shop dates back to 1986) and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Data Bases (of which the ?rst instance dates back to 1997). Since the two conferences were ?rst collocated in 2001, both machine learning and data m- ing communities have realized how each discipline bene?ts from the advances, and participates to de?ning the challenges, of the sister discipline. Accordingly, a single ECML PKDD Steering Committee gathering senior members of both communities was appointed in 2008. In 2010, as in previous years, ECML PKDD lasted from Monday to F- day. It involved six plenary invited talks, by Christos Faloutsos, Jiawei Han, Hod Lipson, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomaso Poggio, and Jur .. gen Schmidhuber, respectively. Monday and Friday were devoted to workshops and tutorials, or- nized and selected by Colin de la Higuera and Gemma Garriga.Continuing from ECML PKDD 2009, an industrial session managed by Taneli Mielikainen and Hugo Zaragoza welcomed distinguished speakers from the ML and DM ind- try: Rakesh Agrawal, Mayank Bawa, Ignasi Belda, Michael Berthold, Jos'eLuis Fl' orez,ThoreGraepel,andAlejandroJaimes.Theconferencealsofeaturedad- coverychallenge,organizedbyAndr' asBenczur ' ,CarlosCastillo,Zolt' anGyon .. gyi, and Julien Masan' es.

The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2010, was held in Barcelona, September 20-24, 2010, consolidating the long junction between the European Conference on Machine Learning (of which the ?rst instance as European wo- shop dates back to 1986) and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Data Bases (of which the ?rst instance dates back to 1997). Since the two conferences were ?rst collocated in 2001, both machine learning and data m- ing communities have realized how each discipline bene?ts from the advances, and participates to de?ning the challenges, of the sister discipline. Accordingly, a single ECML PKDD Steering Committee gathering senior members of both communities was appointed in 2008. In 2010, as in previous years, ECML PKDD lasted from Monday to F- day. It involved six plenary invited talks, by Christos Faloutsos, Jiawei Han, Hod Lipson, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomaso Poggio, and Jur .. gen Schmidhuber, respectively. Monday and Friday were devoted to workshops and tutorials, or- nized and selected by Colin de la Higuera and Gemma Garriga.Continuing from ECML PKDD 2009, an industrial session managed by Taneli Mielikainen and Hugo Zaragoza welcomed distinguished speakers from the ML and DM ind- try: Rakesh Agrawal, Mayank Bawa, Ignasi Belda, Michael Berthold, Jos'eLuis Fl' orez,ThoreGraepel,andAlejandroJaimes.Theconferencealsofeaturedad- coverychallenge,organizedbyAndr' asBenczur ' ,CarlosCastillo,Zolt' anGyon .. gyi, and Julien Masan' es.

The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2010, was held in Barcelona, September 20-24, 2010, consolidating the long junction between the European Conference on Machine Learning (of which the ?rst instance as European wo- shop dates back to 1986) and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Data Bases (of which the ?rst instance dates back to 1997). Since the two conferences were ?rst collocated in 2001, both machine learning and data m- ing communities have realized how each discipline bene?ts from the advances, and participates to de?ning the challenges, of the sister discipline. Accordingly, a single ECML PKDD Steering Committee gathering senior members of both communities was appointed in 2008. In 2010, as in previous years, ECML PKDD lasted from Monday to F- day. It involved six plenary invited talks, by Christos Faloutsos, Jiawei Han, Hod Lipson, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomaso Poggio, and Jur .. gen Schmidhuber, respectively. Monday and Friday were devoted to workshops and tutorials, or- nized and selected by Colin de la Higuera and Gemma Garriga.Continuing from ECML PKDD 2009, an industrial session managed by Taneli Mielikainen and Hugo Zaragoza welcomed distinguished speakers from the ML and DM ind- try: Rakesh Agrawal, Mayank Bawa, Ignasi Belda, Michael Berthold, Jos'eLuis Fl' orez,ThoreGraepel,andAlejandroJaimes.Theconferencealsofeaturedad- coverychallenge,organizedbyAndr' asBenczur ' ,CarlosCastillo,Zolt' anGyon .. gyi, and Julien Masan' es.

This is the second volume of a two volume collection on Structural Complexity. This volume assumes as a prerequisite knowledge about the topics treated in Volume I, but the present volume itself is nearly self-contained. As in Volume I, each chapter of this book ends with a section entitled "Bibliographical Remarks", in which the relevant references for the chapter are briefly commented upon. These sections might also be of interest to those wanting an overview of the evolution of the field, as well as relevant related results which are not included in the text. Each chapter includes a section of exercises. The reader is encouraged to spend some time on them. Some results presented as exercises are occasionally used later in the text. A reference is provided for the most interesting and for the most useful exercises. Some exercises are marked with a • to indicate that, to the best knowledge of the authors, the solution has a certain degree of difficulty. Many topics from the field of Structural Complexity are not treated in depth, or not treated at all. The authors bear all responsibility for the choice of topics, which has been made based on the interest of the authors on each topic. Many friends and colleagues have made suggestions or corrections. In partic­ ular we would like to express our gratitude to Richard Beigel, Ron Book, Rafael Casas, Jozef Gruska, Uwe Schoning, Pekka Orponen, and Osamu Watanabe.