Proceedings of the 10th Plenary Scientific Session of the International Bureau of Strata Mechanics, World Mining Congress, Stockholm, June 1987.

Data mining is a very active research area with many successful real-world app- cations. It consists of a set of concepts and methods used to extract interesting or useful knowledge (or patterns) from real-world datasets, providing valuable support for decision making in industry, business, government, and science. Although there are already many types of data mining algorithms available in the literature, it is still dif cult for users to choose the best possible data mining algorithm for their particular data mining problem. In addition, data mining al- rithms have been manually designed; therefore they incorporate human biases and preferences. This book proposes a new approach to the design of data mining algorithms. - stead of relying on the slow and ad hoc process of manual algorithm design, this book proposes systematically automating the design of data mining algorithms with an evolutionary computation approach. More precisely, we propose a genetic p- gramming system (a type of evolutionary computation method that evolves c- puter programs) to automate the design of rule induction algorithms, a type of cl- si cation method that discovers a set of classi cation rules from data. We focus on genetic programming in this book because it is the paradigmatic type of machine learning method for automating the generation of programs and because it has the advantage of performing a global search in the space of candidate solutions (data mining algorithms in our case), but in principle other types of search methods for this task could be investigated in the future.

Coal Mine Structures is based on a six-year study, carried out at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne between 1976 and 1982 and financed by the National Coal Board and the European Coal and Steel Community (Projects 7220 - ACj806 and 7220 - ACj814), into the behaviour of under ground openings in British coal mines. The original work has been expanded to include other relevant British and international data. How ever, it remains, deliberately, a personal view based on a specific - albeit broad - research programme. It does not pretend to be a complete description of the behaviour of shafts, tunnels, rooms, pillars and long wall excavations. Nor does it set out to provide a manual for design. The specific aim is to show, often through consideration of quite detailed laboratory and field data, how the observed performance of some under ground structures during mining, can be explained by the deformation characteristics of the rocks which surround them. The work is based on observatiollB by many engineers working for the National Coal Board's Mining Research and Development Establishment, and by research associates and postgraduate students at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am grateful to them all, but I am particularly indebted to Dr A. H. Wilson and Mr M. J. Bell of the National Coal Board, to Dr P. F. R. Altounyan, Dr P. Garritty, Dr P. Holmes, and Dr P. D. Shelton formerly of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, to Dr R. N.