In 2002, the group continued to be active on several topics in collaboration with the group of Machine Learning at the Università del Piemonte Orientale at Alessandria: the line of research started in 2001 about the analysis of event sequences that present interesting problems for machine learning techniques continued with new efforts in this year. Discovering complex events made of simple ones in sequences of events is a quite hard task that is useful in several application domains, such as log analysis, network traffic analysis, and bioinformatics.

The research activity of the group continues also around the extraction of statistical dependencies among data. The new paradigm of data dependence, that allows to find the actual significant dependencies among data, has been further studied. Some applications for the analyses of WEB data and texts have been carried on (see references section).

Furthermore, the concept of data dependence has been studied from the viewpoint of the Information Theory, and, in particular, a renewed definition of the mutual information is investigated. Finally, the concept of support of patterns (such as the itemsets) that in Data Mining is based on simple statistical measures is currently analysed in order to propose a well-founded, theoretical definition based on the Bayes' Theorem.

A new branch of research centered on the analysis of the role that databases play in the knowledge discovery process has been started in 2000 and continued in 2001 and 2002. This new area of research named "inductive databases" aims at studying the potentialities of query languages in the iterative process of knowledge discovery. Inductive databases are studied also from the viewpoint of the evaluation and execution of the queries.