There has been much interest developed in the data mining field both in the academia and the industry over the past
10-15 years. The number of researchers and practitioners working in the field and the number of scientific papers
published in various data mining outlets increased drastically over this period. Major commercial vendors incorporated
various data mining tools into their products, and numerous applications in many areas, including life sciences, finance,
CRM, and Web-based applications, have been developed and successfully deployed.
Moreover, this interest is no longer limited to the researchers working in the traditional fields of statistics, machine
learning and databases, but has recently expanded to other fields, including operations research/management science
(OR/MS) and mathematics, as evidenced from various data mining tracks organized at different INFORMS meetings,
special issues of OR/MS journals and the recent conference on Mathematical Foundations of Learning Theory
organized by mathematicians.