Since year 2000, scientists on artificial and natural intelligences started to study chance discovery - methods for discovering events/situations that significantly affect decision making. Partially because the editors Ohsawa and Abe are teaching at schools of Engineering and of Literature with sharing the interest in chance discovery, this book reflects interdisciplinary aspects of progress: First, as an interdisciplinary melting pot of cognitive science, computational intelligence, data mining/visualization, collective intelligence, ... etc, chance discovery came to reach new application domains e.g. health care, aircraft control, energy plant, management of technologies, product designs, innovations, marketing, finance etc. Second, basic technologies and sciences including sensor technologies, medical sciences, communication technologies etc. joined this field and interacted with cognitive/computational scientists in workshops on chance discovery, to obtain breakthroughs by stimulating each other. Third, “time” came to be introduced explicitly as a significant variable ruling causalities - background situations causing chances and chances causing impacts on events and actions of humans in the future. Readers may urge us to list the fourth, fifth, sixth, ... but let us stop here and open this book.

Chance discovery means discovering chances - the breaking points in systems, the marketing windows in business, etc. It involves determining the significance of some piece of information about an event and then using this new knowledge in decision making. The techniques developed combine data mining methods for finding rare but important events with knowledge management, groupware, and social psychology. The reader will find many applications, such as finding information on the Internet, recognizing changes in customer behavior, detecting the first signs of an imminent earthquake, etc. This first book dedicated to chance discovery covers the state of the art in the theory and methods and examines typical scenarios, and it thus appeals to researchers working on new techniques and algorithms and also to professionals dealing with real-world applications.

For this book, the editors invited contributions from indispensable research areas relevant to "chance discovery", which has been defined as the discovery of events significant for making a decision, and studied since 2000. The chapters contain contributions to identifying rare or hidden events and explaining their significance. The methods presented in this book are based on the interaction of human, machine, and humans’ living environment.

This book and its sister volumes, i.e., LNCS vols. 3610, 3611, and 3612, are the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC 2005), jointly held with the 2nd International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD 2005, LNAI vols. 3613 and 3614) from 27 to 29 August 2005 in Changsha, Hunan, China.

Annotation This book documents the scientific outcome and constitutes the final report of the Japanese research project on discovery science. During three years more than 60 scientists participated in the project and developed a wealth of new methods for knowledge discovery and data mining. The 52 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and span the whole range of knowledge discovery from logical foundations and inductive reasoning to statistical inference and computational learning. A broad variety of advanced applications are presented including knowledge discovery and data mining in very large databases, knowledge discovery in network environments, text mining, information extraction, rule mining, Web mining, image processing, and pattern recognition.

Eight sections of this book span fundamental issues of knowledge discovery, classification and clustering, trend and deviation analysis, dependency derivation, integrated discovery systems, augumented database systems and application case studies. The appendices provide a list of terms used in the literature of the field of data mining and knowledge discovery in databases, and a list of online resources for the KDD researcher.