This volume contains the research reports of the Discovery Science pro ject in Japan (No. 10143106), in which more than 60 scientists participated. It was a three-year pro ject sponsored by Grant-in-Aid for Scienti?c Research on Priority Areas from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. This pro ject mainly aimed to (1) develop new methods for knowledge discovery, (2) install network environments for knowledge discovery, and (3) establish Discovery Science as a new area of study in Computer Science / Arti?cial Intelligence. In order to attain...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Discovery Science, DS 2001, held in Washington, DC, USA, in November 2001.
The 30 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers and 11 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Among the topics addressed in their relation to discovery science are inference, algorithmic learning, heuristic search, database management, data mining, inductive logic programming, information agents, information retrieval, information visualization, etc.