KDD-93 - PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES IN KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES

Over 60 researchers from 10 countries took part in the Third Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) Workshop, held during the Eleventh Natio nal Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C. A major trend evident at the workshop was the transition to applications in th e core KDD area of discovery of relatively simple patterns in relation al databases; the most successful applications are appearing in the ar eas of greatest need, where the databases are so large that manual ana lysis is impossible. Progress has been facilitated by the availability of commercial KDD tools for both generic discovery and domain-specifi c applications such as marketing. At the same time, progress has been slowed by problems such as lack of statistical rigor, overabundance of patterns, and poor integration. Besides applications, the main themes of this workshop were (1) the discovery of dependencies and models an d (2) integrated and interactive KDD systems.