Theoretical frameworks for data mining

Research in data mining and knowledge discovery in databases has mostly concentrated on developing good algorithms for various data mining tasks (see for example the recent proceedings of KDD conferences). Some parts of the research effort have gone to investigating data mining process, user interface issues, database topics, or visualization [7]. Relatively little has been published about the theoretical foundations of data mining. In this paper I present some possible theoretical approaches to data mining. The area is at its infancy, and there probably are more questions than answers in this paper.