Preface

ALT 2012 was dedicated to the theoretical foundations of machine learning and took place in the historical building of the Université Lumière Lyon 2 (berges du Rhônes). 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, complexity of learning, online learning, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning, clustering, statistical learning, regression, bandit problems, Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension, probably approximately correct learning, information-based methods, and applications of algorithmic learning theory.

The present volume contains the texts of the 23 papers presented at ALT 2012, divided into groups of papers on inductive inference, teaching and PAC–learning, statistical learning theory and classification, relations between models and data, bandit problems, online learning of individual sequences, and on other models of online learning. The volume also contains the texts or abstracts of the invited talks:

• Luc De Raedt (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), “Declarative Modeling for Machine Learning and Data Mining” (joint invited speaker for ALT 2012 and DS 2012)
• Shai Shalev-Shwartz (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel), “Learnability Beyond Uniform Convergence” (invited speaker for ALT 2012)
• Pascal Massart (Université Paris-Sud, France), “Some Rates of Convergence for the Selected Lasso Estimator” (tutorial speaker for ALT 2012)
• Toon Calders (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands), “Recent Developments in Pattern Mining” (invited speaker for DS 2012)
• Gilbert Ritschard (Université de Genève, Switzerland), “Exploring Sequential Data” (tutorial speaker for DS 2012).

Since 1999, ALT has been awarding the E. M. Gold Award for the most outstanding student contribution. This year, the award was given to Ziyuan Gao for his paper “Confident and Consistent Partial Learning of Recursive Functions” co-authored by Frank Stephan.

ALT 2012 was the 23rd in the ALT conference series, established in Japan in 1990. 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), Nader Bshouty (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel) Marcus Hutter (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia), 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), Gilles Stoltz (Ecole Normale Supérieure, France), 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 Lyon in October 2012. Without their efforts and their willingness to choose ALT 2012 as a forum to report on their research, this conference would not have been possible.

ALT 2012 and DS 2012 were organized by the Université Lumière Lyon 2, France. We are very grateful to the General Chair Djamel Abdelkader Zighed and the General Local Arrangements Chair Stéphane Lallich. We would like to thank them and their team for the tremendous amount of work they have dedicated to making ALT 2012 and DS 2012 a success. We are grateful for the continuous collaboration with the series Discovery Science. In particular, we would like to thank the Conference Chair Jean-Gabriel Ganascia and the Program Committee Chairs Philippe Lenca and Jean-Marc Petit of Discovery Science 2012.

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.

We are grateful to the members of the Program Committee for ALT 2012 and the subreferees for their hard work in selecting a good program for ALT 2012. 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 in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

General Chair (ALT 2012 and DS 2012)

General Local Chair (ALT 2012 and DS 2012)

ALT 2012 Conference Chair

Program Committee

ALT 2012 Local Arrangements

Subreferees

Sponsoring Institutions

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