Jean-Francois Boulicaut - Böcker

The proceedings of ECML/PKDD 2004 are published in two separate, albeit - tertwined,volumes:theProceedingsofthe 15thEuropeanConferenceonMac- ne Learning (LNAI 3201) and the Proceedings of the 8th European Conferences on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 3202). The two conferences were co-located in Pisa, Tuscany, Italy during September 20-24, 2004. It was the fourth time in a row that ECML and PKDD were co-located. - ter the successful co-locations in Freiburg (2001), Helsinki (2002), and Cavtat- Dubrovnik (2003), it became clear that researchersstrongly supported the or- nization of a major scienti?c event about machine learning and data mining in Europe. We are happy to provide some statistics about the conferences. 581 di?erent papers were submitted to ECML/PKDD (about a 75% increase over 2003); 280 weresubmittedtoECML2004only,194weresubmittedtoPKDD2004only,and 107weresubmitted to both.Aroundhalfofthe authorsforsubmitted papersare from outside Europe, which is a clear indicator of the increasing attractiveness of ECML/PKDD. The Program Committee members were deeply involved in what turned out to be a highly competitive selection process.We assigned each paper to 3 - viewers, deciding on the appropriate PC for papers submitted to both ECML and PKDD. As a result, ECML PC members reviewed 312 papers and PKDD PC members reviewed 269 papers. We accepted for publication regular papers (45 for ECML 2004 and 39 for PKDD 2004) and short papers that were as- ciated with poster presentations (6 for ECML 2004 and 9 for PKDD 2004). The globalacceptance ratewas14.5%for regular papers(17% if we include the short papers).

The proceedings of ECML/PKDD 2004 are published in two separate, albeit - tertwined,volumes:theProceedingsofthe 15thEuropeanConferenceonMac- ne Learning (LNAI 3201) and the Proceedings of the 8th European Conferences on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 3202). The two conferences were co-located in Pisa, Tuscany, Italy during September 20-24, 2004. It was the fourth time in a row that ECML and PKDD were co-located. - ter the successful co-locations in Freiburg (2001), Helsinki (2002), and Cavtat- Dubrovnik (2003), it became clear that researchersstrongly supported the or- nization of a major scienti?c event about machine learning and data mining in Europe. We are happy to provide some statistics about the conferences. 581 di?erent papers were submitted to ECML/PKDD (about a 75% increase over 2003); 280 weresubmittedtoECML2004only,194weresubmittedtoPKDD2004only,and 107weresubmitted to both.Aroundhalfofthe authorsforsubmitted papersare from outside Europe, which is a clear indicator of the increasing attractiveness of ECML/PKDD. The Program Committee members were deeply involved in what turned out to be a highly competitive selection process.We assigned each paper to 3 - viewers, deciding on the appropriate PC for papers submitted to both ECML and PKDD. As a result, ECML PC members reviewed 312 papers and PKDD PC members reviewed 269 papers. We accepted for publication regular papers (45 for ECML 2004 and 39 for PKDD 2004) and short papers that were as- ciated with poster presentations (6 for ECML 2004 and 9 for PKDD 2004). The globalacceptance ratewas14.5%for regular papers(17% if we include the short papers).

Introduction The dramatic increase in available computer storage capacity over the last 10 years has led to the creation of very large databases of scienti?c and commercial information. The need to analyze these masses of data has led to the evolution of the new ?eld knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) at the intersection of machine learning, statistics and database technology. Being interdisciplinary by nature, the ?eld o?ers the opportunity to combine the expertise of di?erent ?elds intoacommonobjective.Moreover,withineach?elddiversemethodshave been developed and justi?ed with respect to di?erent quality criteria. We have toinvestigatehowthesemethods cancontributeto solvingthe problemofKDD. Traditionally, KDD was seeking to ?nd global models for the data that - plain most of the instances of the database and describe the general structure of the data. Examples are statistical time series models, cluster models, logic programs with high coverageor classi?cation models like decision trees or linear decision functions. In practice, though, the use of these models often is very l- ited, because global models tend to ?nd only the obvious patterns in the data, 1 which domain experts already are aware of . What is really of interest to the users are the local patterns that deviate from the already-known background knowledge. David Hand, who organized a workshop in 2002, proposed the new ?eld of local patterns.

The interconnected ideas of inductive databases and constraint-based mining are appealing and have the potential to radically change the theory and practice of data mining and knowledge discovery. This book reports on the results of the European IST project "cInQ" (consortium on knowledge discovery by Inductive Queries) and its final workshop entitled Constraint-Based Mining and Inductive Databases organized in Hinterzarten, Germany in March 2004.

The4thInternationalWorkshoponKnowledgeDiscoveryinInductiveDatabases (KDID 2005) was held in Porto, Portugal, on October 3, 2005 in conjunction with the 16th European Conference on Machine Learning and the 9th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Ever since the start of the ?eld of data mining, it has been realized that the integration of the database technology into knowledge discovery processes was a crucial issue. This vision has been formalized into the inductive database perspective introduced by T. Imielinski and H. Mannila (CACM 1996, 39(11)). The main idea is to consider knowledge discovery as an extended querying p- cess for which relevant query languages are to be speci?ed. Therefore, inductive databases might contain not only the usual data but also inductive gener- izations (e. g. , patterns, models) holding within the data. Despite many recent developments, there is still a pressing need to understand the central issues in inductive databases. Constraint-based mining has been identi?ed as a core technology for inductive querying, and promising results have been obtained for rather simple types of patterns (e. g. , itemsets, sequential patterns). However, constraint-based mining of models remains a quite open issue. Also, coupling schemes between the available database technology and inductive querying p- posals are not yet well understood. Finally, the de?nition of a general purpose inductive query language is still an on-going quest.

It is our pleasure to present the proceedings of Discovery Science 2008, the 11th International Conference on Discovery Science held in Budapest, Hungary, October 13-16, 2008. It was co-located with ALT 2008, the 19th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, whose proceedings are available in the twin volume LNAI 5254. This combination of DS and ALT conferences has been successfully organized each year since 2002. It provides a forum for the researchersworking on many di?erent aspects of scienti?c discovery. Indeed, ALT/DS 2008 covered both the possibility to automate part of the scienti?c discoveryandthenecessarysupporttothehumanprocessofdiscoveryinscience. Interestingly, this co-location also provided the opportunity for an exciting joint program of tutorials and invited talks. The number of submitted papers was 58, i.e., slightly more than the previous year. The Program Committee members were involved in a rigorous selection process based on three reviews per paper. At the end, we selected 26 long papers thanks to the recommendations of the experts based on relevance, novelty, signi?cance, technical quality, and clarity. Although some short papers were submitted, none of them was selected.