Machine-Learning Research

Machine-learning research has been making great progress in many directions. The four directions are (1) the improvement of classification accuracy by learning ensembles of classifiers, (2) methods for scaling up supervised learning algorithms, (3) reinforcement learning, and (4) the learning of complex stochastic models. 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.