Twenty-?ve years have passed since the publication of the Russian version of the book Estimation of Dependencies Based on Empirical Data (EDBED for short). Twen- ?ve years is a long period of time. During these years many things have happened. Looking back, one can see how rapidly life and technology have changed, and how slow and dif?cult it is to change the theoretical foundation of the technology and its philosophy. I pursued two goals writing this Afterword: to update the technical results presented in EDBED (the easy goal) and to describe a general picture of how the new ideas developed...

The aim of this book is to discuss the fundamental ideas which lie behind the statistical theory of learning and generalization. It considers learning as a general problem of function estimation based on empirical data. Omitting proofs and technical details, the author concentrates on discussing the main results of learning theory and their connections to fundamental problems in statistics. These include: * the setting of learning problems based on the model of minimizing the risk functional from empirical data * a comprehensive analysis of the empirical risk minimization principle including...