Introduction

In recent years world-wide interest in Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) and Data Mining has soared. Organisations store vast amounts of information about their products, customers and many other areas of their business; these collections of data are termed data warehouses. The idea that these huge databases can be mined for interesting patterns has appealed to a wide range of organisations. Typical KDD projects may investigate customer behaviour, plan direct marketing, detect fraudulent activity or identify machine faults.

Organisations who aim to partake in KDD projects will require a considerable amount of expert knowledge about both the data and the KDD methods so that high quality, valid and interesting results can be obtained. In the years since KDD was introduced, the number of approaches, algorithms and software packages has grown rapidly, not to mention the size of the databases that are being collected.

The Data Mining group at UEA can be contacted at:    Data Mining Research Group School of Information Systems University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK Tel: +44 (0)1603 592850    Fax: +44 (0)1603 593345 Email: vjrs@sys.uea.ac.uk Web: www.sys.uea.ac.uk/kdd