Human and machine discovery are gradual problem-solving processes of searching large problem spaces for incompletely defined goal objects. Research on problem solving has usually focused on searching an `instance space' (empirical exploration) and a `hypothesis space' (generation of theories). In scientific discovery, searching must often extend to other spaces as well: spaces of possible problems, of new or improved scientific instruments, of new problem representations, of new concepts, and others. This book focuses especially on the processes for finding new problem representations and new concepts, which are relatively new domains for research on discovery. Scientific discovery has usually been studied as an activity of individual investigators, but these individuals are positioned in a larger social structure of science, being linked by the `blackboard' of open publication (as well as by direct collaboration). Even while an investigator is working alone, the process is strongly influenced by knowledge and skills stored in memory as a result of previous social interactions. In this sense, all research on discovery, including the investigations on individual processes discussed in this book, is social psychology, or even sociology.

Human and machine discovery are gradual problem-solving processes of searching large problem spaces for incompletely defined goal objects. Research on problem solving has usually focused on searching an `instance space' (empirical exploration) and a `hypothesis space' (generation of theories). In scientific discovery, searching must often extend to other spaces as well: spaces of possible problems, of new or improved scientific instruments, of new problem representations, of new concepts, and others. This book focuses especially on the processes for finding new problem representations and new concepts, which are relatively new domains for research on discovery. Scientific discovery has usually been studied as an activity of individual investigators, but these individuals are positioned in a larger social structure of science, being linked by the `blackboard' of open publication (as well as by direct collaboration). Even while an investigator is working alone, the process is strongly influenced by knowledge and skills stored in memory as a result of previous social interactions. In this sense, all research on discovery, including the investigations on individual processes discussed in this book, is social psychology, or even sociology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, PKDD 2000, held in Lyon, France in September 2000. The 86 revised papers included in the book correspond to the 29 oral presentations and 57 posters presented at the conference. They were carefully reviewed and selected from 147 submissions. The book offers topical sections on new directions, rules and trees, databases and reward-based learning, classification, association rules and exceptions, instance-based discovery, clustering, and time series analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, PKDD'99, held in Prague, Czech Republic in September 1999.
The 28 revised full papers and 48 poster presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 full papers submitted. The papers are organized in topical sections on time series, applications, taxonomies and partitions, logic methods, distributed and multirelational databases, text mining and feature selection, rules and induction, and interesting and unusual issues.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Symposium on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, PKDD '97, held in Trondheim, Norway, in June 1997.The volume presents a total of 38 revised full papers together with abstracts of one invited talk and four tutorials. Among the topics covered are data and knowledge representation, statistical and probabilistic methods, logic-based approaches, man-machine interaction aspects, AI contributions, high performance computing support, machine learning, automated scientific discovery, quality assessment, and applications.