On Explanation-Oriented Data Mining

The objective of data mining is to discover new and useful knowledge, in order to gain a better understanding of nature. This in fact is the goal of scientists when carrying out scientific research, independent in their various disciplines. This goal-oriented view enables us to re-examine data mining in a wider context of scientific research. The consequence after the immediate comparison between scientific research and data mining is that, an explanation discovery and evaluation task is added to the existing data mining framework. In this chapter, we elaborate the basic concerns and methods of explanation discovery and evaluation. Explanationoriented association mining is employed as a concrete example to show the whole framework.