of probabilistic expert systems. We extend the basic method to handle missing data and hidden (latent) variables. We show how to perform probabilistic inference by averaging over the inferences of multiple belief networks. Results are presented of a preliminary evaluation of an algorithm for constructing a belief

Systems for inducing concept descriptions from examples are valuable tools for assisting in the task of knowledge acquisition for expert systems. This paper presents a description and empirical evaluation of a new induction system, cn2, designed for the efficient induction of simple

introduce wrapper induction, a technique for automatically constructing wrappers. Our techniques can be described in terms of three main contributions. First, we pose the problem of wrapper construction as one of inductive learn...

Abstract. This paper is a survey of the inverse scattering problem for time-harmonic acoustic and electromagnetic waves at fixed frequency. We begin by a discussion of “weak scattering ” and Newton-type methods for solving the inverse scattering problem for acoustic waves, including a brief

Abstract: We use the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data collected in Indian states in 1992 and 1993 to estimate the relationship between household wealth and the probability a child (aged 6 to 14) is enrolled in school. A methodological difficulty to overcome is that the NFHS, modeled

The technology for building knowledge-based systems by inductive inference from examples has been demonstrated successfully in several practical applications. This paper summarizes an approach to synthesizing decision trees that has been used in a variety of systems, and it describes one

Many existing rule learning systems are computationally expensive on large noisy datasets. In this paper we evaluate the recently-proposed rule learning algorithm IREP on a large and diverse collection of benchmark problems. We show that while IREP is extremely efficient, it frequently gives error rates higher than those of C4.5 and C4.5rules. We then propose a number of modifications resulting in an algorithm RIPPERk that is very competitive with C4.5rules with respect to error rates, but much more efficient on large samples. RIPPERk obtains error rates lower than or equivalent to C4.5rules on 22 of 37 benchmark problems, scales nearly linearly with the number of training examples, and can efficiently process noisy datasets containing hundreds of thousands of examples.

Cluster analysis is the automated search for groups of related observations in a data set. Most clustering done in practice is based largely on heuristic but intuitively reasonable procedures and most clustering methods available in commercial software are also of this type. However

How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis

Text categorization – the assignment of natural language texts to one or more predefined categories based on their content – is an important component in many information organization and management tasks. We compare the effectiveness of five different automatic learning algorithms for text categorization in terms of learning speed, realtime classification speed, and classification accuracy. We also examine training set size, and alternative document representations. Very accurate text classifiers can be learned automatically from training examples. Linear Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are particularly promising because they are very accurate, quick to train, and quick to evaluate. 1.1 Keywords Text categorization, classification, support vector machines, machine learning, information management.