DM: PKDD99 Discovery Challenge

[Berka Petr,KIZI]

Dear colleagues,
distribute, please, following information.


     PKDD'99 Discovery Challenge
     Call for Contributions

     http://lisp.vse.cz/pkdd99/chall.htm
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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. 
So only people registered for the PKDD'99 can participate in the 
discovery challenge. (For more info about the PKDD conference visit 
http://lisp.vse.cz/pkdd99)

The Discovery Challenge should constitute a collection of data and 
problems as a common ground for better comparisons and discussions of 
the applicability of KDD methods on a real-world problems with 
respect 
to both KDD methodology and application viewpoints.


TASK DESCRIPTION

Once upon a time, there was a bank offering services to private 
persons. The services include managing of accounts, offering loans, 
etc. The bank wants to improve their services by finding interesting 
groups of clients (e.g. to differentiate between good and bad 
clients). The bank managers have only vague idea, who is good client 
(whom to offer some additional services) and who is bad client (whom 
to watch carefully to minimize the bank looses). Fortunately, the 
bank stores data about their clients, their accounts (transactions 
within several months), the loans already granted, the credit cards 
issued etc. So the bank managers hope to find some answers (and 
questions as well) by analyzing this data.

The discovery challenge task is to

   * define a problem which can help the bank to improve their 
     services (e.g. define the notion of a good or bad client, 
suggest 
     new/current service that can be offered to a group of clients 
     etc.); from the KDD point of view the problem can be 
     classification, prediction or description,
   * show how KDD can be used to solve the problem (even if the 
     results are not much significant from the KDD point of view, 
they 
     can be important for the bank).


CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions are expected to present the problem definition, the 
necessary preprocessing steps, the applying of data mining algorithms 
(either own or third-party approaches) and the interpretation of 
results (in terms of both KDD and bank points of view). The main 
emphasis of the reported experiments should be on the application 
methodology.

Submitted papers should be in English and not exceed 10 single-spaced
pages. The paper must be submitted to Petr Berka by July 1st, 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. Wa also think about publishing some 
contributions in an international journal.


DISCOVERY CHALLENGE CHAIR

Petr Berka
University of Economics
W. Churchill Sq. 4
CZ 130-67 Prague 3
Czech Republic
Email:  berka@vse.cz

phone: +420-2-24095-465
fax:   +420-2-793-47-49


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Petr Berka                              ph: (+420 2) 793 67 66 ext.226
Laboratory of Intelligent Systems,      ph/fax: (+420 2) 793 47 49
University of Economics,                E-mail: berka@vse.cz 
Ekonomicka 957, 148 01 Prague 4, Czech Republic