Agent-Mining Interaction: An Emerging Area

In the past twenty years, agents (we mean autonomous agent and multi-agent systems) and data mining (also knowledge discovery) have emerged separately as two of most prominent, dynamic and exciting research areas. In recent years, an increasingly remarkable trend in both areas is the agent-mining interaction and integration. This is driven by not only researcher’s interests, but intrinsic challenges and requirements from both sides, as well as benefits and complementarity to both communities through agent-mining interaction. In this paper, we draw a high-level overview of the agent-mining interaction from the perspective of an emerging area in the scientific family. To promote it as a newly emergent scientific field, we summarize key driving forces, originality, major research directions and respective topics, and the progression of research groups, publications and activities of agent-mining interaction. Both theoretical and application-oriented aspects are addressed. The above investigation shows that the agent-mining interaction is attracting everincreasing attention from both agent and data mining communities. Some complicated challenges in either community may be effectively and efficiently tackled through agent-mining interaction. However, as a new open area, there are many issues waiting for research and development from theoretical, technological and practical perspectives.