052321 VU Recent Developments in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (2024S)

The amount of data gathered every year is steadily increasing, and mankind is curious for more and more knowledge that they can discover in these vast amounts of data. Even though data is a mighty resource, we are not using its full potential:
Surprisingly much (if not most) knowledge that is discovered in data nowadays is found with methods developed already in the 20th century.
Most data scientists do not stay updated with new developments and, thus, results in research and industry do not reach the high quality of state-of-the-art methods.
This course aims at teaching recently developed, important state-of-the-art methods to discover knowledge in databases– from a theoretical point of view as well as their implementation and application. We learn how to discover, assess, and deeply understand novel methods that are more complex than fundamental methods taught in other courses. We address different aspects of learning new methods from the field of knowledge discovery in databases: learning lecture-style by listening to talks, discovering a new method by reading a scientific paper, implementing it, teaching it to others in a talk as well as discussing it in groups and writing a report as a team.

This semester, we focus on clustering methods and causality.

Methods/ Course:
The first part of the course will consist of live lectures teaching the basics.
We start with interactive lectures about clustering. During that, students will start their individual projects by reading about one recently published method from the field of clustering in detail.
After that, there will be lectures on causality with a small test at the end.

The second part is more hands-on: students will have time to implement their chosen method in python and prepare a talk about it.
Students will give talks in groups covering similar topics and write a paper in team work about their findings where they compare their methods experimentally within the group as well as theoretically with both, their group and the others.