Special Session (SS01): Soft Computing Techniques in Data Mining

Organizers: Francisco Herrera, Jesús Alcalá-Fdez

This session has been accepted at the IDEAL 2009 conference which will be held in Burgos, Spain at September 23-26, 2009.

Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) has become a process of considerable interest in recent years as the amounts of data in many databases have grown tremendously large. This process generally consists of the following three phases: Pre-processing, Data Mining (DM) and Post-processing. DM plays a critical role to the KDD process. It involves applying specific algorithms for automatically discovering high level knowledge from real world, large and complex data sets. This idea of automatically discovering knowledge from databases is a very attractive and challenging task, both for academia and industry. Hence, there has been a growing interest in DM in several Artificial Intelligence (AI)-related areas.

Soft Computing (SC) is an AI area comprising of a consortium of methodologies that works synergistically and provides, in one form or another, flexible information processing capability for handling real-life ambiguous situations. Its aim is to exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, approximate reasoning, and partial truth in order to achieve tractability, robustness and low-cost solutions. The guiding principle is to devise methods of computation that lead to an acceptable solution at low cost by seeking for an approximate solution to an imprecisely/precisely formulated

All these have prompted that SC methodologies are most widely applied in DM. So, this topic has presented considerable interest in the Computation Intelligence community in the last few years.

Objectives and Scope

The aim of the session is to provide a forum to disseminate and discuss Soft Computing approaches in classification, regression and unsupervised learning (association rules, clustering, etc), with special attention to the Evolutionary Knowledge Extraction and Fuzzy Data Mining. We want to offer an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to identify new promising research directions in this area. Potential viable research themes are:

Evolutionary Knowledge Extraction
Fuzzy Data Mining
Scalability: large scale data mining, distributed model, etc
Interpretability
Data Preprocessing and Soft Computing
Software for Fuzzy Data Mining and Evolutionary Knowledge Extraction

Important Dates

Extended Deadlines

Deadline for Papers Submission (according IDEAL 2009 instructions): May 26th May 30th, 2009
By June 23rd June 30th, 2009, authors will receive the notification of acceptance/rejection.
Deadline for revised accepted papers: June 29th July 8th, 2009.
Deadline for publication files: July 1st July 10th, 2009.
Author registration due: July 15th, 2009.