This book is about inductive databases and constraint-based data mining, emerging research topics lying at the intersection of data mining and database research. The aim of the book as to provide an overview of the state-of- the art in this novel and - citing research area. Of special interest are the recent methods for constraint-based mining of global models for prediction and clustering, the uni?cation of pattern mining approaches through constraint programming, the clari?cation of the re- tionship between mining local patterns and global models, and the proposed in- grative frameworks and approaches for inducive databases. On the application side, applications to practically relevant problems from bioinformatics are presented. Inductive databases (IDBs) represent a database view on data mining and kno- edge discovery. IDBs contain not only data, but also generalizations (patterns and models) valid in the data. In an IDB, ordinary queries can be used to access and - nipulate data, while inductive queries can be used to generate (mine), manipulate, and apply patterns and models. In the IDB framework, patterns and models become ”?rst-class citizens” and KDD becomes an extended querying process in which both the data and the patterns/models that hold in the data are queried.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Mining Complex Data, MCD 2007, held in Warsaw, Poland, in September 2007, co-located with ECML and PKDD 2007. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected; they present original results on knowledge discovery from complex data. In contrast to the typical tabular data, complex data can consist of heterogenous data types, can come from different sources, or live in high dimensional spaces. All these specificities call for new data mining strategies.