Combinatorial pattern discovery for scientific data

Abstract

Suppose you are given a set of natural entities (e.g., proteins, organisms, weather patterns, etc.) that possess some important common externally observable properties. You also have a structural description of the entities (e.g., sequence, topological, or geometrical data) and a distance metric. Combinatorial pattern discovery is the activity of finding patterns in the structural data that might explain these common properties based on the metric.