Preface to the Fifth International Workshop on Chance Discovery

Since 2000 we have been organizing workshops on chance discovery in several conferences such as Int’l Conf. on Machine Learning (2005), and several invited sessions on chance discovery mainly in Int’l Conf. on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems. We also have had several special issues on chance discovery in several journals such as New Generation Computing (2003) and Int’l Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms (2010). For Int’l Conf. on Data Mining, this is the first time to organize a workshop on chance discovery. For general readers, we briefly introduce chance discovery. Chance discovery is the discovery of chance, rather than discovery by chance. A "chance" here means a novel or rare event/situation that can be conceived either as an opportunity or as a risk in the future. The "discovery" of chances is crucially important, since it may have a significant impact on human decision making. Desirable effects of opportunities should be actively promoted, whereas preventive measures should be taken in the case of discovered risks. In other words, chance discovery aims to provide means for inventing or surviving the future, rather than simply predicting the future. To explain "chance," we usually use an example of economic "bubble" in Japan. A chance can be considered as an alarm, such as an inflation of money supply that will change the middle or long term economic "bubble" situation (Japan, in 1990). We can also find a similar symptom before the event, such as the rise in subprime loans that incited market panic in August 2007. Thus researches on chance discovery have been focusing on theories, strategies, methods and techniques of "how to discover chance?"