Publications

Salford Systems hosted its first annual data mining conference focused on CART(R), MARS(R), TreeNet(tm) and RandomForests(tm) in San Francisco, March 22-24. The four creators of CART opened the conference with an informal discussion of their intellectual histories and how they came to work together in the creation of CART. This was the first time that all four authors, Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman, Richard Olshen, and Charles Stone have appeared jointly in a public discussion. Over the following two days the authors also gave individual key note talks on their most recent research, and in a concluding session, the authors came together again in a joint forum to discuss the future of data mining. The six sessions were video taped and both video and transcripts are expected to be available from the Conference website in late May (http://www.cartdatamining.com).

The conference also hosted another 25 papers focused on the use and application of CART, MARS and TreeNet, drawn from Banking, Insurance, Financial Markets Modeling, Market Research, Drug Discovery, Ecology, Clinical Medicine, Proteomics, Genetics, Dental Research and Epidemiology. Paper titles are also listed on the conference website and most of the papers will also be available for download or on CD ROM in May (http://www.cartdatamining.com). Evaluation versions of the software used in these papers as well as other papers are available from http://www.salford-systems.com.

More 120 persons attended with registrants coming from North America, Europe, and Asia, and the success of the conference has prompted to plan similar sessions in March 2005 in New York and Barcelona. Dates and venues will be finalized shortly.