Machine Learning Group

Basser Department of Computer Science

University of Sydney

The Machine Learning (ML) Group investigates methods of acquiring and/or modifying theories from observations. Learning is one of the fundamental attributes of intelligence, and ML is currently the most active area of research in AI.

Membership of this group is

• Ross Quinlan
• Nitin Indurkhya
• Thierry Van de Merckt
• Mike Cameron-Jones (from the University of Tasmania)

with postgraduate student

• Zijian Zheng

In addition, it is common for distinguished members of the internation ML research community to visit the group for several months.

Visitors in 1994 included

• Professor Ray Mooney (University of Texas)
• Dr William Cohen (ATT Bell Laboratories)
• Professor Pavel Brazdil (University of Porto)
• Dr Patrick Langley (Stanford University)

The group has close ties with the corresponding group at the University of New South Wales headed by Professor Claude Sammut , and the two groups hold a monthly joint meeting.

Principal research interests of the group are

• First-order learning (also known as inductive logic programming)
• Learning to predict values (also known as regression)
• Hybrid classification methods
• Construction of new features that simplify theories
• Learning theory, especially aspects of the Minimum Description Length principle

and applications of all of the above in practical learning tasks.

A selection of papers by the group are available for anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.su.oz.au in the directory pub/ml.

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