Second International Workshop

Descriptive analysis of music corpora is important to musicologists who are interested in identifying the properties that characterize specific genres of music. In this study we present such an analysis of a large corpus of folk tunes, all labeled by their origin. Subgroup Discovery (SD) is a rule learning technique located at the intersection of predictive and descriptive induction. One of the advantages of using this technique is the intuitive and interpretable result in the form of a collection of simple rules. Classification accuracy is not the goal of this study. Instead, we discuss some of the highest scoring rules with respect to their descriptive power.