Publications

I am pleased to announce the publication of the following NEW BOOK:
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery with Evolutionary Algorithms
by Alex A. Freitas
Springer-Verlag, 2002
264 pp. ISBN 3-540-43331-7

This book integrates two areas of computer science, namely data mining and evolutionary algorithms. Both these areas have become increasingly popular in the last few years, and their integration is currently an area of active research. In general, data mining consists of extracting knowledge from data. In this book we particularly emphasize the importance of discovering comprehensible and interesting knowledge, which is potentially useful to the user for intelligent decision making. In a nutshell, the motivation for applying evolutionary algorithms to data mining is that evolutionary algorithms are robust search methods which perform a global search in the space of candidate solutions (rules or another form of rule representation). In contrast, most rule induction methods perform a local, greedy search in the space of candidate rules.

Intuitively, the global search of evolutionary algorithms can discover interesting rules and patterns that would be missed by the greedy search. This book presents a comprehensive review of basic concepts of both data mining and evolutionary algorithms and discusses significant advances in the integration of these two areas. It is self-contained, explaining both basic concepts and advanced topics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction
2 Data Mining Tasks and Concepts
3 Data Mining Paradigms
4 Data Preparation
5 Basic Concepts of Evolutionary Algorithms
6 Genetic Algorithms for Rule Discovery
7 Genetic Programming for Rule Discovery
8 Evolutionary Algorithms for Clustering
9 Evolutionary Algorithms for Data Preparation
10 Evolutionary Algorithms for Discovering Fuzzy Rules
11 Scaling up Evolutionary Algorithms for Large Data Sets
12 Conclusions and Research Directions
Index

Publisher's address for orders and related information:
Springer
Customer Service
Haberstr. 7
69126 Heidelberg
Germany
Fax: ++49 (0)6221 345 229
E-mail: orders@springer.de

Dr. Alex A. Freitas
Computing Laboratory
University of Kent at Canterbury
Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF
United Kingdom
E-mail: A.A.Freitas@ukc.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/aaf/