Machine-Learning Research

The last five years have seen an explosion in machine-learning research. This explosion has many causes: First, separate research communities in symbolic machine learning, computational learning theory, neural networks, statistics, and pattern recognition have discovered one another and begun to work together. Second, machine-learning techniques are being applied to new kinds of problem, including knowledge discovery in databases, language processing, robot control, and combinatorial optimization, as well as to more traditional problems such as speech recognition, face recognition, handwriting recognition, medical data analysis, and game playing. In this article, I selected four topics within machine learning where there has been a lot of recent activity. The purpose of the article is to describe the results in these areas to a broader AI audience and to sketch some of the open research problems. The topic areas are (1) ensembles of classifiers, (2) methods for scaling up supervised learning algorithms, (3) reinforcement learning, and (4) the learning of complex stochastic models. The reader should be cautioned that this article is not a comprehensive review of each of these topics. Rather, my goal is to provide a representative sample of the research in each of these four areas. In each of the areas, there are many other papers that describe relevant work. I apologize to those authors whose work I was unable to include in the article. Ensembles of Classifiers