Subgroup discovery

The discovery of (interesting) subgroups has a high practical relevance in all domains of science or business. For example, consider statements such as: ”the unemployment rate is above average for young men with a low educational level”, ”smokers with a positive family history are at a significantly higher risk for coronary heart disease”, or ”single males living in rural areas do rarely take out a life policy”. Subgroup discovery is well suited for finding such dependencies, i.e., discovering relations between a dependent and (several) independent variables, for inductive and explorative data analysis tasks. This article aims to give a first idea of subgroup discovery: we introduce the discovery task and discuss the setting and the issues concerning the search process. Then, we give an outlook on further research directions.