INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING
(( ICML-99 ))
Bled, Slovenia, 27-30 June 1999
This workshop addresses an important aspect related to Knowledge Discovery
in Databases (KDD) or Data Mining (DM) and Machine Learning (ML) in
pre-processing and analyzing real-world data.
Knowledge Discovery in Databases has become a very attractive discipline
both for research and industry within last few years. Its goal is to extract
"pieces" of knowledge or "patterns" from usually very large databases. One of
its components is an inductive process which induces the above "pieces" of
knowledge; usually it is machine learning. However, most of the machine learning
algorithms require more or less prepared data in a reasonable format. Therefore,
some preprocessing routines as well as postprocessing ones should fill up the
entire chain of data processing.
The data which are to be processed by an algorithm are usually noisy and
often inconsistent. Many steps are involved before the actual data analysis
starts. Moreover, many ML systems do not easily allow processing of numerical
attributes as well as numerical (continuous) classes. Therefore, certain
procedures have to precede the actual data analysis process.
Second, a result of an ML algorithm, such as a decision tree, a set of
decision rules, or weights and topology of a neural net, need not be perfect
from the view of custom or commercial applications. It is quite known that
a concept description as a result of an inductive process has to be
usually post-processed. Post-processing procedures usually include various
pruning routines, rule quality processing, rule filtering, rule combination,
or even knowledge integration. All these procedures provide a kind of "sym-
bolic filter" for noisy, imprecise, or "non-user-friendly" knowledge derived
by an inductive algorithm.
Thus, the pre- and post-processing tools always help the DM algorithms to
investigate databases as well as to refine the acquired knowledge. Usually,
these tools exploit techniques that are not genuinely logical, e.g., statis-
tics, neural nets, and others.
These reasons let us to launch this workshop. We would be pleased to
accept papers from the following areas:
o Mapping data
o Scaling learning algorithms to large datasets
o Handling noise
o Processing of unknown attribute values
o Discretization/fuzzification of numerical attributes
o Grouping of values of symbolic attributes
o Consistency checking
o Attribute (feature) selection and ordering
o Constructing new attributes
o Transforming attributes
o Processing of continuous classes
o Interpretation and explanation
o Evaluation
o Knowledge combination and integration
This workshop provides an opportunity for researchers to learn about the
challenges and real problems in development and applications of machine
learning techniques.
Organizers:
----------
Ivan Bruha
McMaster University http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~bruha
Dept. Computing & Software Phone: +1-905-5259140 ext 23439
Hamilton, Ont. Fax: +1-905-5240340
Canada L8S 4K1 Email: bruha@mcmaster.ca
and
Marko Bohanec
Institut Jozef Stephan
Jamova 37
Ljubljana, Slovenia Email: marko.bohanec@ijs.si
Program Committee:
-----------------
A. (Fazel) Famili
Editor-in-Chief, Intelligent Data Analysis http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ida
Institute for Information Technology Phone: +1-613-9938554
National Research Council of Canada, Email: Fazel.Famili@ai.iit.nrc.ca
Montreal Rd, Ottawa, Canada K1A 0R6 http://ai.iit.nrc.ca/~fazel
Ivan Bruha, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
Email: bruha@mcmaster.ca
Marko Bohanec, Institut Jozef Stephan, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Email: marko.bohanec@ijs.si
Stan Matwin, University of Ottawa, Information Technology and Engineering,
Ottawa, Ont., Canada K1N 6N5
Email: stan@site.uottawa.ca5
Gholamreza Nakhaeizadeh, Daimler Benz AG, Germany
Email: nakhaeizadeh@dbag.ulm.daimlerbenz.com
Igor Kononenko, Ljubljana Univ., Ljubljana, Slovenia
Email: Igor.Kononenko@fer.uni-lj.si
Petr Berka, Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, University of Economics,
Prague, Czech Republic
E-mail: berka@vse.cz
W.F.S. (Skip) Poehlman, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
Email: skip@church.cas.mcmaster.ca
Organization Notes:
------------------
There will be one invited talk on the workshop which will survey the
given topic as well as introduce own research.
About upto 10 accepted papers will be presented (each 15-20 min). If
there is a larger interest, then some papers might be accepted as posters.
Maximum size is 10 (ten) pages.
Attendance is not limited to paper authors. However, in order to get an
early estimate of the possible attendance, we would appreciate an informal note
about your intention to attend.
A panel session at the end of the workshop will summarise what has been
learned from the workshop and will identify future directions.
>>>>>> Please note that authors of the best papers will be invited to submit
an extended version of their papers to the Intelligent Data Analysis Journal
(http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ida), or even a special issue of the journal
regarding this topic might be published.
Submission:
----------
Submit your paper either by regular mail or by Email to I. Bruha (see
the address above). If you use Email, then the Postscript format would be the
most suitable one.
Important Dates:
---------------
Deadline for submission: 30-Mar-99
Notification: 30-Apr-99
Camera-ready copy: 15-May-99