This book constitutes the refereed preceedings of the 13th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2002, held in Helsinki, Finland in August 2002.
The 41 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Among the topics covered are computational discovery, search strategies, Classification, support vector machines, kernel methods, rule induction, linear learning, decision tree learning, boosting, collaborative learning, statistical learning, clustering, instance-based learning, reinforcement learning,...

This Festschrift volume, published to honor Esko Ukkonen on his 60th birthday, includes papers that present research on computational pattern matching and string algorithms, two areas that have benefited significantly from the work of Ukonen.

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Machine Learning (LNAI 2430) and the 6th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 2431). These two c- ferences were colocated in Helsinki, Finland during August 19 23, 2002. ECML and PKDD were held together for the second year in a row, following the success of the colocation in Freiburg in 2001. Machine learning and knowledge discovery are two highly related ?elds and ECML/PKDD is a unique forum to foster their collaboration. The bene't of colocation to both the...