The last decade has witnessed a revolution in interdisciplinary research where the boundaries of different areas have overlapped or even disappeared. New fields of research emerge each day where two or more fields have integrated to form a new identity. Examples of these emerging areas include bioinformatics (synthesizing biology with computer and information systems), data mining (combining statistics, optimization, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and databases), and modern heuristics (integrating ideas from tens of fields such as biology, forest, immunology, statistical mechanics, and physics to inspire search techniques). These integrations have proved useful in substantiating problemsolving approaches with reliable and robust techniques to handle the increasing demand from practitioners to solve real-life problems. With the revolution in genetics, databases, automation, and robotics, problems are no longer those that can be solved analytically in a feasible time. Complexity arises because of new discoveries about the genome, path planning, changing environments, chaotic systems, and many others, and has contributed to the increased demand to find search techniques that are capable of getting a good enough solution in a reasonable time. This has directed research into heuristics.

Real life problems are known to be messy, dynamic and multi-objective, and involve high levels of uncertainty and constraints. Because traditional problem-solving methods are no longer capable of handling this level of complexity, heuristic search methods have attracted increasing attention in recent years for solving such problems. Inspired by nature, biology, statistical mechanics, physics and neuroscience, heuristics techniques are used to solve many problems where traditional methods have failed. Data Mining: A Heuristic Approach will be a repository for the applications of these techniques in the area of data mining.