PKDD’99 Discovery Challenge

A Collaborative Effort in Knowledge Discovery from Databases

Call for Contributions

http://lisp.vse.cz/pkdd99/Challenge/chall.htm

Data download

• Download the Financial Data (~17.5M zipped file, ~67M unzipped data)
• Download the Medical Data (~2M zipped file, ~6M unzipped data)

Motivation

Knowledge discovery in real-world databases requires a broad scope of techniques and forms of knowledge. Both the knowledge and the applied methods should fit the discovery tasks and should adapt to knowledge hidden in the data. PKDD'99 Discovery Challenge will encourage a collaborative research effort, a broad and unified view of knowledge and methods of discovery, and emphasis on business problems and solutions to those problems.

Time and place

The Discovery Challenge will be held as a part of the 3rd European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD’99), September 15 - 18, 1999, Prague, Czech Republic. Only those registered for PKDD’99 can participate in the discovery challenge.

Data sets

• Financial domain
• Medical domain

In the financial domain, the dataset consists of 8 tables describing clients of a bank, their accounts, transactions, permanent orders, granted loans and issued credit cards. In the medical domain, the dataset consists of 3 tables describing patients with collagen diseases.

Discovery Challenge guidelines

1. Each participant can use any KDD techniques and discover as much knowledge as possible.
   Ideally each submitted contribution will include
   • the proposed business objectives (goals that may be of interest to database users),
   • a brief summary of datamining effort; this summary may include the data preprocessing tasks like data extraction, sampling, data integration and homogenization, data cleaning, data transformation, the data mining step as well as the evaluation criteria apporwed,
   • presentation of the discovered knowledge, and
   • an explanation for database users how they can apply the discovered knowledge.
   Since the results may be unexpected, the final applications may be different from those initially proposed.
2. In order to reach a common framework for comparisons, the presentation of the discovered knowledge should include a clear summary of the predictions it makes possible. Ideally, such a summary shows parts of the entire dataset that can be removed from data because they can be predicted by the discovered knowledge nad the remaining data.
3. The deadline for camera-ready contributions is August 9, 1999. Soon afterwards each database coordinator and the Discovery Challenge Chair will issue the schedule of presentations.
4. All presentation will be done during a sequence of special sessions. The time allocated for each presentation will be about 20 minutes.
5. Ample time will be provided during and after the special sessions for interaction between participants. The discussion will be aimed at a joint representation of knowledge and method, and on a synthesis of all contributions.
6. A panel at a joint plenary session will summarize the main findings and problems generated by the Challenge.
7. A plan for a joint publication will be drafted at the conference, with each author's role defined. Joint publication will put all discoveries in a unified perspective.

Submitted papers should be in English and not exceed 6 single-spaced pages. Use 10pt font, the printed area being 22.5cm (9in) height and 16.3cm (6.5in) width in the center of each page; pages not numbered. The paper must be submitted to Petr Berka by August 9th, 1999. We prefer electronic submission of PostScript files by e-mail or using the “submit contribution” option from the PKDD’99 Web homepage. All contributions will be published in a technical report of the University of Economics.

Discovery Challenge Chair