Preface

ALT 2011 was dedicated to the theoretical foundations of machine learning and took place on the campus of the Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. ALT provides a forum for high quality talks with a strong theoretical background and scientific interchange in areas such as inductive inference, universal prediction, teaching models, grammatical inference, formal languages, query learning, complexity of learning, on-line learning and relative loss bounds, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning, clustering, active learning, statistical learning, regression, bandit problems, support vector machines, Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension, probably approximately correct learning, Bayesian and causal networks, boosting and bagging, information-based methods, minimum description length, Kolmogorov complexity, kernels, graph learning, decision tree methods, Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, intelligent agents, and real-world applications of algorithmic learning theory.

DS 2011 was the 14th International Conference on Discovery Science and focused on the development and analysis of methods for intelligent data analysis, knowledge discovery and machine learning, as well as their application to scientific knowledge discovery. As it is already tradition, it was co-located and held in parallel with Algorithmic Learning Theory.

The present volume contains the texts of the 28 papers presented at ALT 2011, divided into groups of papers on inductive inference, regression, bandit problems, online learning, kernels and margin-based methods, intelligent agents, and on other learning models. The volume also contains the texts or abstracts of the invited talks:

• Peter Auer (Montanuniversität Leoben, Austria), Models for Autonomously Motivated Exploration in Reinforcement Learning (invited speaker for ALT 2011)
• Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal, Canada), On the Expressive Power of Deep Architectures (joint invited speaker for ALT 2011 and DS 2011)
• Jorma Rissanen (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland), Optimal Estimation (invited speaker for ALT 2011)
• Eyke Hüllermeier jointly with Johannes Fürnkranz (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, and Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, respectively), Learning from Label Preferences (invited speaker for DS 2011)
• Ming Li (University of Waterloo, Canada), Information Distance and Its Extensions (invited speaker for DS 2011).

ALT 2011 was the 22nd in the ALT conference series, established in Japan in 1990. A second root is the conference series Analogical and Inductive Inference previously held in 1986, 1989, 1992 which merged with the conference series ALT after a collocation in the year 1994. From then on, ALT became an international conference series which kept its strong links to Japan but also was regularly held at overseas destinations including Australia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, the United States of America, and Finland.

The ALT series is supervised by its Steering Committee: Naoki Abe (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, USA), Shai Ben-David (University of Waterloo, Canada), Jyrki Kivinen (University of Helsinki, Finland), Philip M. Long (Google, Mountain View, USA), Akira Maruoka (Ishinomaki Senshu University, Japan), Takeshi Shinohara (Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, Japan), Frank Stephan (National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore), Einoshin Suzuki (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan), Csaba Szepesvári (University of Alberta, Canada), Eiji Takimoto (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan), György Turán (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA and University of Szeged, Hungary), Osamu Watanabe (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan), Thomas Zeugmann (Chair, Hokkaido University, Japan), and Sandra Zilles (Publicity Chair, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada).

We would like to thank the many people and institutions who contributed to the success of the conference. In particular, we want to thank our authors for contributing to the conference and for coming to Espoo in October 2011. Without their efforts and their willingness to choose ALT 2011 as a forum to report on their research, this conference would not have been possible.

We would like to thank the Aalto University, School of Science, Department of Information and Computer Science, the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, and Algodan -- Finnish Centre of Excellence for Algorithmic Data Analysis Research for generously sponsoring the conference ALT 2011.

We are furthermore grateful to the Aalto University for hosting the event. The support of the Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Algodan was a great help, organizationally and financially, for the conferences ALT 2011 and DS 2011.

We also thank the journal Artificial Intelligence for its generous financial support to the conferences ALT 2011 and DS 2011.

We are also grateful that we could use the excellent conference management system EasyChair for putting together the program for ALT 2011; EasyChair was developed mainly by Andrei Voronkov and is hosted at the University of Manchester. The system is cost-free.

The conference series ALT has in this year as in many previous years been co-located with the series Discovery Science. We are grateful for this continuous collaboration. In particular, we would like to thank the conference chair Heikki Mannila and the Program Committee chairs Tapio Elomaa and Jaakko Hollmén of Discovery Science 2011.

We would like to thank Olli Simula for organizing the conference and the tremendous amount of work he has dedicated to making ALT 2011 a success. We want to extend our thanks to the other members of the local organization committee, who were there to organize the reception, to sit at the information desk and to do the other duties which are connected to organizing and hosting a conference.

We are grateful to the members of the Program Committee for ALT 2011 and the subreferees for their hard work to select a good program for ALT 2011. Reviewing papers and checking the correctness of results is demanding in time and skills and we very much appreciate this contribution to the conference. Last but not least we thank Springer for their support in preparing and publishing this volume of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

Conference Chair

Program Committee

Local Arrangements

Subreferees

Sponsoring Institutions

University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

Algodan -- Finish Centre of Excellence for Algorithmic Data Analysis Research

©Copyright Notice:
The document of this page is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provision of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer-Verlag. Violations are liable for prosecution under German Copyright Law.