This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2006, held in Berlin, Germany in September 2006, jointly with PKDD 2006.

The 46 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers presented together with abstracts of 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 564 papers submitted to both, ECML and PKDD. The papers present a wealth of new results in the area and address all current issues in machine learning.