17 Constraint - based Data Mining

Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is a complex interactive process. The promising theoretical framework of inductive databases considers this is essentially a querying process. It is enabled by a query language which can deal either with raw data or patterns which hold in the data. Mining patterns turns to be the so-called inductive query evaluation process for which constraint-based Data Mining techniques have to be designed. An inductive query specifies declaratively the desired constraints and algorithms are used to compute the patterns satisfying the constraints in the data. We survey important results of this active research domain. This chapter emphasizes a real breakthrough for hard problems concerning local pattern mining under various constraints and it points out the current directions of research as well.