The book Knowledge Discovery in Databases, edited by Piatetsky-Shapiro and Frawley [PSF91], is an early collection of research papers on knowledge discovery from data. The book Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, edited by Fayyad, Piatetsky-Shapiro, Smyth, and Uthurusamy [FPSSe96], is a collection of later research results on knowledge discovery and data mining. There have been many data mining books published in recent years, including Predictive Data Mining by Weiss and Indurkhya [WI98], Data Mining Solutions: Methods and Tools for Solving Real-World Problems by Westphal and Blaxton [WB98], Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management by Berry and Linofi [BL99], Building Data Mining Applications for CRM by Berson, Smith, and Thearling [BST99], Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques by Witten and Frank [WF05], Principles of Data Mining (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning) by Hand, Mannila, and Smyth [HMS01], The Elements of Statistical Learning by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman [HTF01], Data Mining: Introductory and Advanced Topics by Dunham, and Data Mining: Multimedia, Soft Computing, and Bioinformatics by Mitra and Acharya [MA03]. There are also books containing collections of papers on particular aspects of knowledge discovery, such as Machine Learning and Data Mining: Methods and Applications edited by Michalski, Brakto, and Kubat [MBK98], and Relational Data Mining edited by Dzeroski and Lavrac [De01], as well as many tutorial notes on data mining in major database, data mining and machine learning conferences.

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques (2nd edition)

As the first book devoted to relational data mining, this coherently written multi-author monograph provides a thorough introduction and systematic overview of the area. The first part introduces the reader to the basics and principles of classical knowledge discovery in databases and inductive logic programming; subsequent chapters by leading experts assess the techniques in relational data mining in a principled and comprehensive way; finally, three chapters deal with advanced applications in various fields and refer the reader to resources for relational data mining.This book will become a valuable source of reference for R&D professionals active in relational data mining. Students as well as IT professionals and ambitioned practitioners interested in learning about relational data mining will appreciate the book as a useful text and gentle introduction to this exciting new field.

Relational Data Mining

Data mining algorithms look for patterns in data. While most existing data mining approaches look for patterns in a single data table, multi-relational data mining (MRDM) approaches look for patterns that involve multiple tables (relations) from a relational database. In recent years, the most common types of patterns and approaches considered in data mining have been extended to the multi-relational case and MRDM now encompasses multi-relational (MR) association rule discovery, MR decision trees and MR distance-based methods, among others. MRDM approaches have been successfully applied to a number of problems in a variety of areas, most notably in the area of bioinformatics. This article provides a brief introduction to MRDM, while the remainder of this special issue treats in detail advanced research topics at the frontiers of MRDM.

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Multi-relational data mining: an introduction

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computersr and people to work in cooperation. Recently, different applications based on this vision have been designed, e.g. in the fields of knowledge management, community web portals, e-learning, multimedia retrieval, etc. It is obvious that the complex metadata descriptions generated on the basis of pre-defined ontologies serve as perfect input data for machine learning techniques. In this paper we propose an approach for clustering ontology-based metadata. Main contributions of this paper are the definition of a set of similarity measures for comparing ontology-based metadata and an application study using these measures within a hierarchical clustering algorithm.

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Clustering Ontology-Based Metadata in the Semantic Web

Relational clustering has attracted more and more attention due to its phenomenal impact in various important applications which involve multi-type interrelated data objects, such as Web mining, search marketing, bioinformatics, citation analysis, and epidemiology. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model for relational clustering, which also provides a principal framework to unify various important clustering tasks including traditional attributes-based clustering, semi-supervised clustering, co-clustering and graph clustering. The proposed model seeks to identify cluster structures for each type of data objects and interaction patterns between different types of objects. Under this model, we propose parametric hard and soft relational clustering algorithms under a large number of exponential family distributions. The algorithms are applicable to relational data of various structures and at the same time unifies a number of stat-of-the-art clustering algorithms: co-clustering algorithms, the k-partite graph clustering, Bregman k-means, and semi-supervised clustering based on hidden Markov random fields.

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A probabilistic framework for relational clustering

Work on first-order clustering has primarily been focused on the task of conceptual clustering, i.e., forming clusters with symbolic generalizations in the given representation language. By contrast, for propositional representations, experience has shown that simple algorithms based exclusively on distance measures can often outperform their concept-based counterparts. In this paper, we therefore build on recent advances in the area of first-order distance metrics and present RDBC, a bottom-up agglomerative clustering algorithm for first-order representations that relies on distance information only and features a novel parameter-free pruning measure for selecting the final clustering from the cluster tree. The algorithm can empirically be shown to produce good clusterings (on the mutagenesis domain) that, when used for subsequent prediction tasks, improve on previous clustering results and approach the accuracies of dedicated predictive learners.

Relational Distance-Based Clustering

Within data analysis, distance-based methods have always been very popular. Such methods assume that it is possible to compute for each pair of objects in a domain their mutual distance (or similarity). In a distance-based setting, many of the tasks usually considered in data mining can be carried out in a surprisingly simple yet powerful way. In this chapter, we give a tutorial introduction to the use of distance-based methods for relational representations, concentrating in particular on predictive learning and clustering. We describe in detail one relational distance measure that has proven very successful in applications, and introduce three systems that actually carry out relational distance-based learning and clustering: RIBL2, RDBC and FORC. We also present a detailed case study of how these three systems were applied to a domain from molecular biology.

Distance based approaches to relational learning and clustering

In this paper, we present an in-depth evaluation of two approaches of extending k-means clustering to work on first-order representations. The first-approach, k-medoids, selects its cluster center from the given set of instances, and is thus limited in its choice of centers. The second approach, k-prototypes, uses a heuristic prototype construction algorithm that is capable of generating new centers. The two approaches are empirically evaluated on a standard benchmark problem with respect to clustering quality and convergence. Results show that in this case indeed the k-medoids approach is a viable and fast alternative to existing agglomerative or top-down clustering approaches even for a small-scale dataset, while k-prototypes exhibited a number of deficiencies.

Mathias Kirsten

Papers

Relational Distance-Based Clustering

Distance based approaches to relational learning and clustering

Extending K-means clustering to first-order representations

Extending K-Means Clustering to First-Order Representations

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