A graduate seminar on foundations of data mining

Abstract

Data mining, the key step in the knowledge discovery in database (KDD) process, is aimed to find implicit, previously unknown and interesting knowledge patterns which can be used to guide our future activities. In order to conduct data mining in a more systematic way, recently the issue of foundations of data mining (FDM) has attracted attentions from researchers. Approaches to FDM such as those based on granular computing (GrC) have been developed. We believe exploring the FDM is an important aspect of DM education. For this purpose, we have developed a graduate seminar course at University of Nebraska at Omaha, which was offered first time in Fall 2005. In this paper, we describe our motivation of developing such a course, report activities conducted in the course, student reading lists, as well as outcome of this course.