interests are in the general areas of fault diagnosis, industrial process modelling based on data mining technique including both theory and applications, computational process modelling and simulation, and applied mathematics.

domains for methods being integrated. Next, we review and compare recent GVis and KDD developments and consider the potential for their integration, emphasizing that an iterative process with user interaction is a central focus for uncovering interesting and meaningful patterns through each. We

Knowledge Discovery in Databases creates the context for developing the tools needed to control the flood of data facing organizations that depend on ever-growing databases of business, manufacturing, scientific and personal information.

For many KDD applications, such as detecting criminal activities in E-commerce, finding the rare instances or the outliers, can be more interesting than finding the common patterns. Existing work in outlier detection regards being an outlier as a binary property. In this paper, we contend

■ Data mining and knowledge discovery in databases have been attracting a significant amount of research, industry, and media attention of late. What is all the excitement about? This article provides an overview of this emerging field, clarifying how data mining and knowledge discovery in databases are related both to each other and to related fields, such as machine learning, statistics, and databases. The article mentions particular real-world applications, specific data-mining techniques, challenges involved in real-world applications of knowledge discovery, and current and future research directions in the field. Across a wide variety of fields, data are

Variable and feature selection have become the focus of much research in areas of application for which datasets with tens or hundreds of thousands of variables are available.

Classification rule mining aims to discover a small set of rules in the database that forms an accurate classifier. Association rule mining finds all the rules existing in the database that satisfy some minimum support and minimum confidence constraints. For association rule mining, the target of discovery is not pre-determined, while for classification rule mining there is one and only one predetermined target. In this paper, we propose to integrate these two mining techniques. The integration is done by focusing on mining a special subset of association rules, called class association rules (CARs). An efficient algorithm is also given for building a classifier based on the set of discovered CARs. Experimental results show that the classifier built this way is, in general, more accurate than that produced by the state-of-the-art classification system C4.5. In addition, this integration helps to solve a number of problems that exist in the current classification systems.

One of the major applications of data mining is in helping companies determine which potential customers to market to. If the expected pro t from a customer is greater than the cost of marketing to her, the marketing action for that customer is executed. So far, work in this area has considered only the intrinsic value of the customer (i.e, the expected pro t from sales to her). We propose to model also the customer's network value: the expected pro t from sales to other customers she may inuence to buy, the customers those may inuence, and so on recursively. Instead of viewing a market as a set of independent entities, we view it as a social network and model it as a Markov random eld. We show the advantages of this approach using a social network mined from a collaborative ltering database. Marketing that exploits the network value of customers|also known as viral marketing|can be extremely eective, but is still a black art. Our work can be viewed as a step towards providing a more solid foundation for it, taking advantage of the availability of large relevant databases. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications| data mining

How do real graphs evolve over time? What are “normal” growth patterns in social, technological, and information networks? Many studies have discovered patterns in static graphs, identifying properties in a single snapshot of a large network, or in a very small number of snapshots; these include heavy tails for in- and out-degree distributions, communities, small-world phenomena, and others. However, given the lack of information about network evolution over long periods, it has been hard to convert these findings into statements about trends over time. Here we study a wide range of real graphs, and we observe some surprising phenomena. First, most of these graphs densify over time, with the number of edges growing superlinearly in the number of nodes. Second, the average distance between nodes often shrinks over time, in contrast to the conventional wisdom that such distance parameters should increase slowly as a function of the number of nodes (like O(log n) orO(log(log n)). Existing graph generation models do not exhibit these types of behavior, even at a qualitative level. We provide a new graph generator, based on a “forest fire” spreading process, that has a simple, intuitive justification, requires very few parameters (like the “flammability” of nodes), and produces graphs exhibiting the full range of properties observed both in prior work and in the present study.

Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.