Machine learning : techniques and foundations

The field of machine learning studies computational methods for acquiring new knowledge, new skills, and new ways to organize existing knowledge. In this paper we present some of the basic techniques and principles that underlie AI research on learning, including methods for learning from examples, learning in problem solving, learning by analogy, grammar acquisition, and machine discovery. In each case, we illustrate the techniques with paradigmatic examples

07181 Abstracts Collection -- Parallel Universes and Local Patterns

From 1 May 2007 to 4 May 2007 the Dagstuhl Seminar 07181 ``Parallel Universes and Local Patterns\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Empirical Study of the Civil Justice System

In this essay, we discuss empirical research on the economic effects of the civil justice system. We discuss research on the effects of three substantive bodies of law- contracts, torts, and property- and research on the effects of the litigation process. We begin with a review of studies of aggregate empirical trends and the important issues involving contracts and torts, both positive and normative. We survey some of the more interesting empirical issues, and we conclude with some suggestions for future work. Because studies involving property law are so divergent, there is no simple description of aggregates that adequately characterizes the subject. In its place, we offer an overview of a number of the most important issues of interest. We describe (selectively) the current state of empirical knowledge, and offer some suggestions for future research. The section on legal process builds on the previous substantive sections. With respect each of the steps, from violation to trial to appeal, we review some of the more important empirical contributions.

Knowledge-Intensive Processes: Characteristics, Requirements and Analysis of Contemporary Approaches

Engineering of knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) is far from being mastered, since they are genuinely knowledge- and data-centric, and require substantial flexibility, at both design- and run-time. In this work, starting from a scientific literature analysis in the area of KiPs and from three real-world domains and application scenarios, we provide a precise characterization of KiPs. Furthermore, we devise some general requirements related to KiPs management and execution. Such requirements contribute to the definition of an evaluation framework to assess current system support for KiPs. To this end, we present a critical analysis on a number of existing process-oriented approaches by discussing their efficacy against the requirements

A new approach for discovering business process models from event logs.

Process mining is the automated acquisition of process models from the event logs of information systems. Although process mining has many useful applications, not all inherent difficulties have been sufficiently solved. A first difficulty is that process mining is often limited to a setting of non-supervised learnings since negative information is often not available. Moreover, state transitions in processes are often dependent on the traversed path, which limits the appropriateness of search techniques based on local information in the event log. Another difficulty is that case data and resource properties that can also influence state transitions are time-varying properties, such that they cannot be considered ascross-sectional.This article investigates the use of first-order, ILP classification learners for process mining and describes techniques for dealing with each of the above mentioned difficulties. To make process mining a supervised learning task, we propose to include negative events in the event log. When event logs contain no negative information, a technique is described to add artificial negative examples to a process log. To capture history-dependent behavior the article proposes to take advantage of the multi-relational nature of ILP classification learners. Multi-relational process mining allows to search for patterns among multiple event rows in the event log, effectively basing its search on global information. To deal with time-varying case data and resource properties, a closed-world version of the Event Calculus has to be added as background knowledge, transforming the event log effectively in a temporal database. First experiments on synthetic event logs show that first-order classification learners are capable of predicting the behavior with high accuracy, even under conditions of noise.Credit; Credit scoring; Models; Model; Applications; Performance; Space; Decision; Yield; Real life; Risk; Evaluation; Rules; Neural networks; Networks; Classification; Research; Business; Processes; Event; Information; Information systems; Systems; Learning; Data; Behavior; Patterns; IT; Event calculus; Knowledge; Database; Noise;

Rule 82 & Tort Reform: An Empirical Study of the Impact of Alaska’s English Rule on Federal Civil Case Filings

Alaska is the only American state that employs a variation of the “English Rule,” whereby the losing party in a civil case must pay the prevailing party’s attorneys’ fees. In recent years, advocates of tort reform have praised Alaska’s Civil Rule 82 as a model for tort reform to help rid the overburdened courts of low merit claims. But does Rule 82 really reduce meritless litigation? This study compares civil case filings in the District of Alaska to a sample of other comparable federal district courts. Although filings in the District of Alaska were lower than the national average, they were indistinguishable from the remainder of the sample. Other measures also failed to demonstrate any significant differences between civil cases in the District of Alaska and the other districts. These results suggest that reformers looking to reduce meritless litigation should look elsewhere for model reform measures

Distinguishing cause from effect using observational data: methods and benchmarks

The discovery of causal relationships from purely observational data is a fundamental problem in science. The most elementary form of such a causal discovery problem is to decide whether X causes Y or, alternatively, Y causes X, given joint observations of two variables X, Y. An example is to decide whether altitude causes temperature, or vice versa, given only joint measurements of both variables. Even under the simplifying assumptions of no confounding, no feedback loops, and no selection bias, such bivariate causal discovery problems are challenging. Nevertheless, several approaches for addressing those problems have been proposed in recent years. We review two families of such methods: Additive Noise Methods (ANM) and Information Geometric Causal Inference (IGCI). We present the benchmark CauseEffectPairs that consists of data for 100 different cause-effect pairs selected from 37 datasets from various domains (e.g., meteorology, biology, medicine, engineering, economy, etc.) and motivate our decisions regarding the "ground truth" causal directions of all pairs. We evaluate the performance of several bivariate causal discovery methods on these real-world benchmark data and in addition on artificially simulated data. Our empirical results on real-world data indicate that certain methods are indeed able to distinguish cause from effect using only purely observational data, although more benchmark data would be needed to obtain statistically significant conclusions. One of the best performing methods overall is the additive-noise method originally proposed by Hoyer et al. (2009), which obtains an accuracy of 63+-10 % and an AUC of 0.74+-0.05 on the real-world benchmark. As the main theoretical contribution of this work we prove the consistency of that method.Comment: 101 pages, second revision submitted to Journal of Machine Learning Researc