Over a century ago, William James proposed that people search through memory much as they rummage through a house looking for lost keys. We scour our environments for territory, food, mates, and information. We search for items in visual scenes, for historical facts, and for the best deals on Internet sites; we search for new friends to add to our social networks, and for solutions to novel problems. What we find is always governed by how we search and by the structure of the environment.
As the power of computing has grown over the past few decades, the field of machine learning has advanced rapidly in both theory and practice. Machine learning methods are usually based on the assumption that the data generation mechanism does not change over time. Yet real-world applications of machine learning, including image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, robot control, and bioinformatics, often violate this common assumption. Dealing with non-stationarity is one of modern machine learning’s greatest challenges.
Dataset shift is a common problem in predictive modeling that occurs when the joint distribution of inputs and outputs differs between training and test stages. Covariate shift, a particular case of dataset shift, occurs when only the input distribution changes. Dataset shift is present in most practical applications, for reasons ranging from the bias introduced by experimental design to the irreproducibility of the testing conditions at training time.
The Internet gives us access to a wealth of information in languages we don't understand. The investigation of automated or semi-automated approaches to translation has become a thriving research field with enormous commercial potential. This volume investigates how machine learning techniques can improve statistical machine translation, currently at the forefront of research in the field.
The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation and machine learning. It draws a diverse group of attendees—physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists—interested in theoretical and applied aspects of modeling, simulating, and building neural-like or intelligent systems.
Pervasive and networked computers have dramatically reduced the cost of collecting and distributing large datasets. In this context, machine learning algorithms that scale poorly could simply become irrelevant. We need learning algorithms that scale linearly with the volume of the data while maintaining enough statistical efficiency to outperform algorithms that simply process a random subset of the data.
Machine learning develops intelligent computer systems that are able to generalize from previously seen examples. A new domain of machine learning, in which the prediction must satisfy the additional constraints found in structured data, poses one of machine learning’s greatest challenges: learning functional dependencies between arbitrary input and output domains. This volume presents and analyzes the state of the art in machine learning algorithms and theory in this novel field.
Signal processing and neural computation have separately and significantly influenced many disciplines, but the cross-fertilization of the two fields has begun only recently. Research now shows that each has much to teach the other, as we see highly sophisticated kinds of signal processing and elaborate hierachical levels of neural computation performed side by side in the brain. In New Directions in Statistical Signal Processing, leading researchers from both signal processing and neural computation present new work that aims to promote interaction between the two disciplines.
The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation. It draws a diverse group of attendees—physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The presentations are interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain imaging, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, emerging technologies, and applications.
The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation. It draws a diverse group of attendees—physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The presentations are interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain imaging, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, emerging technologies, and applications.
