Observational calculi were introduced in the 1960’s as a tool of logic of discovery. Formulas of observational calculi correspond to assertions on analysed data. Truthfulness of suitable assertions can lead to acceptance of new scientific hypotheses. The general goal was to automate the process of discovery of scientific knowledge using mathematical logic and statistics. The GUHA method for producing true formulas of observational calculi relevant to the given problem of scientific discovery was developed. Theoretically interesting and practically important results on observational calculi were achieved. Special attention was paid to formulas - couples of Boolean attributes derived from columns of the analysed data matrix. Association rules introduced in the 1990’s can be seen as a special case of such formulas. New results on logical calculi and association rules were achieved. They can be seen as a logic of association rules. This can contribute to solving contemporary challenging problems of data mining research and practice. The book covers thoroughly the logic of association rules and puts it into the context of current research in data mining. Examples of applications of theoretical results to real problems are presented. New open problems and challenges are listed. Overall, the book is a valuable source of information for researchers as well as for teachers and students interested in data mining.

Professor Richard S. Michalski passed away on September 20, 2007. Once we learned about his untimely death we immediately realized that we would no longer have with us a truly exceptional scholar and researcher who for several decades had been inf- encing the work of numerous scientists all over the world - not only in his area of exp- tise, notably machine learning, but also in the broadly understood areas of data analysis, data mining, knowledge discovery and many others. In fact, his influence was even much broader due to his creative vision, integrity, scientific excellence and excepti- ally wide intellectual horizons which extended to history, political science and arts. Professor Michalski’s death was a particularly deep loss to the whole Polish sci- tific community and the Polish Academy of Sciences in particular. After graduation, he began his research career at the Institute of Automatic Control, Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. In 1970 he left his native country and hold various prestigious positions at top US universities. His research gained impetus and he soon established himself as a world authority in his areas of interest – notably, he was widely cons- ered a father of machine learning.

Data-mining has become a popular research topic in recent years for the treatment of the "data rich and information poor" syndrome. Currently, application oriented engineers are only concerned with their immediate problems, which results in an ad hoc method of problem solving. Researchers, on the other hand, lack an understanding of the practical issues of data-mining for real-world problems and often concentrate on issues that are of no significance to the practitioners. In this volume, we hope to remedy problems by (1) presenting a theoretical foundation of data-mining, and (2) providing important new directions for data-mining research. A set of well respected data mining theoreticians were invited to present their views on the fundamental science of data mining. We have also called on researchers with practical data mining experiences to present new important data-mining topics.

Data Management is the process of planning, coordinating and controlling data resources. More often, applications need to store and search a large amount of data. Managing Data has been continuously challenged by demands from various areas and applications and has evolved in parallel with advances in hardware and computing techniques. This volume focuses on its recent advances and it is composed of five parts and a total of eighteen chapters. The first part of the book contains five contributions in the area of information retrieval and Web intelligence: a novel approach to solving index selection problem, integrated retrieval from Web of documents and data, bipolarity in database querying, deriving data summarization through ontologies, and granular computing for Web intelligence. The second part of the book contains four contributions in knowledge discovery area. Its third part contains three contributions in information integration and data security area. The remaining two parts of the book contain six contributions in the area of intelligent agents and applications of data management in medical domain.

This book constitutes the major results of the EU COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) Action 274: TARSKI - Theory and Applications of Relational Structures as Knowledge Instruments - running from July 2002 to June 2005. The papers are devoted to further understanding of interdisciplinary issues involving relational reasoning by addressing relational structures and the use of relational methods in applicable object domains.

The IEEE ICDM 2004 workshop on the Foundation of Data Mining and the IEEE ICDM 2005 workshop on the Foundation of Semantic Oriented Data and Web Mining focused on topics ranging from the foundations of data mining to new data mining paradigms. The workshops brought together both data mining researchers and practitioners to discuss these two topics while seeking solutions to long standing data mining problems and stimul- ing new data mining research directions. We feel that the papers presented at these workshops may encourage the study of data mining as a scienti?c ?eld and spark new communications and collaborations between researchers and practitioners. Toexpressthevisionsforgedintheworkshopstoawiderangeofdatam- ing researchers and practitioners and foster active participation in the study of foundations of data mining, we edited this volume by involving extended and updated versions of selected papers presented at those workshops as well as some other relevant contributions. The content of this book includes st- ies of foundations of data mining from theoretical, practical, algorithmical, and managerial perspectives. The following is a brief summary of the papers contained in this book.

Mechanizing hypothesis formation is an approach to exploratory data analysis. Its development started in the 1960s inspired by the question “can computers formulate and verify scientific hypotheses?”. The development resulted in a general theory of logic of discovery. It comprises theoretical calculi dealing with theoretical statements as well as observational calculi dealing with observational statements concerning finite results of observation. Both calculi are related through statistical hypotheses tests. A GUHA method is a tool of the logic of discovery. It uses a one-to-one relation between theoretical and observational statements to get all interesting theoretical statements. A GUHA procedure generates all interesting observational statements and verifies them in a given observational data. Output of the procedure consists of all observational statements true in the given data. Several GUHA procedures dealing with association rules, couples of association rules, action rules, histograms, couples of histograms, and patterns based on general contingency tables are involved in the LISp-Miner system developed at the Prague University of Economics and Business. Various results about observational calculi were achieved and applied together with the LISp-Miner system. The book covers a brief overview of logic of discovery. Many examples of applications of the GUHA procedures to solve real problems relevant to data mining and business intelligence are presented. An overview of recent research results relevant to dealing with domain knowledge in data mining and its automation is provided. Firsthand experiences with implementation of the GUHA method in the Python language are presented.

Data mining from traditional relational databases as well as from non-traditional ones such as semi-structured data, Web data, and scientific databases housing biological, linguistic, and sensor data has recently become a popular way of discovering hidden knowledge. This book on database support for data mining is developed to approaches exploiting the available database technology, declarative data mining, intelligent querying, and associated issues, such as optimization, indexing, query processing, languages, and constraints. Attention is also paid to the solution of data preprocessing problems, such as data cleaning, discretization, and sampling. The 16 reviewed full papers presented were carefully selected from various workshops and conferences to provide complete and competent coverage of the core issues. Some papers were developed within an EC funded project on discovering knowledge with inductive queries.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International RuleML Symposium, RuleML 2015, held in Berlin, Germany, in August 2015. The 25 full papers, 4 short papers, 2 full keynote papers, 2 invited research track overview papers, 1 invited paper, 1 invited abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: general RuleML track; complex event processing track, existential rules and datalog+/- track; legal rules and reasoning track; rule learning track; industry track.

This two-volume set, LNCS 13810 and 13811, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science, LOD 2022, together with the papers of the Second Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, ACAIN 2022. The total of 84 full papers presented in this two-volume post-conference proceedings set was carefully reviewed and selected from 226 submissions. These research articles were written by leading scientists in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, computational optimization, neuroscience, and data science presenting a substantial array of ideas, technologies, algorithms, methods, and applications.