Multi-relational data mining

Data mining algorithms look for patterns in data. While most existing data mining approaches look for patterns in a single data table, multi-relational data mining (MRDM) approaches look for patterns that involve multiple tables (relations) from a relational database. In recent years, the most common types of patterns and approaches considered in data mining have been extended to the multi-relational case and MRDM now encompasses multi-relational (MR) association rule discovery, MR decision trees and MR distance-based methods, among others. MRDM approaches have been successfully applied to a number of problems in a variety of areas, most notably in the area of bioinformatics. This article provides a brief introduction to MRDM, while the remainder of this special issue treats in detail advanced research topics at the frontiers of MRDM.