Discovery Science: 11th International Conference, Ds 2008, Budapest, Hungary, October 13-16, 2008, Proceedings

It is our pleasure to present the proceedings of Discovery Science 2008, the 11th International Conference on Discovery Science held in Budapest, Hungary, October 13-16, 2008. It was co-located with ALT 2008, the 19th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, whose proceedings are available in the twin volume LNAI 5254. This combination of DS and ALT conferences has been successfully organized each year since 2002. It provides a forum for the researchersworking on many di?erent aspects of scienti?c discovery. Indeed, ALT/DS 2008 covered both the possibility to automate part of the scienti?c discoveryandthenecessarysupporttothehumanprocessofdiscoveryinscience. Interestingly, this co-location also provided the opportunity for an exciting joint program of tutorials and invited talks. The number of submitted papers was 58, i.e., slightly more than the previous year. The Program Committee members were involved in a rigorous selection process based on three reviews per paper. At the end, we selected 26 long papers thanks to the recommendations of the experts based on relevance, novelty, signi?cance, technical quality, and clarity. Although some short papers were submitted, none of them was selected.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Discovery Science, DS 2008, held in Budapest, Hungary, in October 2008, co-located with the 19th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, ALT 2008.

The 26 revised long papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers address all current issues in the area of development and analysis of methods for intelligent data analysis, knowledge discovery and machine learning, as well as their application to scientific knowledge discovery. The papers are organized in topical sections on learning, feature selection, associations, discovery processes, learning and chemistry, clustering, structured data, and text analysis.