Patterns
that Matter

News and updates

  • 22.12.2020 Our paper titled Estimating Conditional Mutual Information for Discrete-Continuous Mixtures using Multi-Dimensional Adaptive Histograms, with Alexander Marx and Lincen Yang, got accepted at SDM 2021. Congratulations Alex and Lincen!
  • 02.12.2020 Our paper titled Evaluating privacy of individuals in medical data, with Shannon Kroes, Mart Janssen, and Rolf Groenwold, got accepted for publication in Health Informatics Journal. Congratulations Shannon!
  • 14.09.2020 I received a Journal Track Reviewer Award at ECML PKDD 2020.
  • 17.08.2020 Our paper titled Online Summarization of Dynamic Graphs using Subjective Interestingness for Sequential Data, with Sarang Kapoor and Dhish Saxena, got accepted for publication in the ECMLPKDD journal track of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. Congratulations Sarang!
  • 24.07.2020 Our paper titled Social Fluidity in Children's Face-to-Face Interaction Networks, with Daniela Gawehns, got accepted at GEM 2020. Congratulations Daniela!
  • 05.06.2020 Our paper titled Discovering Outstanding Subgroup Lists for Numeric Targets using MDL, with Hugo Proença, Peter Grünwald, and Thomas Bäck, got accepted at ECML PKDD 2020. Congratulations Hugo!
  • 23.04.2020 Our paper titled First results of a ferritin-based blood donor deferral policy in the Netherlands, with Marieke Vinkenoog, Katja van den Hurk, Marian van Kraaij, and Mart Janssen, got accepted for publication in Transfusion. Congratulations Marieke!
  • 01.03.2020 I have been promoted to associate professor at Leiden University.
  • 13.02.2020 Our paper titled Discovering Subjectively Interesting Multigraph Patterns, with Sarang Kapoor and Dhish Saxena, got accepted for publication in Machine Learning. Congratulations Sarang!
  • 20.01.2020 Our paper titled Vouw: Geometric Pattern Mining using the MDL Principle, with Micky Faas, got accepted at IDA 2020. Congratulations Micky!
  • 20.01.2020 Our paper titled Widening for MDL-based Retail Signature Discovery, with Clément Gautrais, Peggy Cellier, and Alexandre Termier, got accepted at IDA 2020. Congratulations Clément!
  • 07.11.2019 NWO has awarded a TTW Perspectief grant to our 5.7M€ research programme titled Integration of Data-drIven and model-based enGIneering in fuTure industriAL Technology With value chaIn optimizatioN (DIGITAL TWIN).
  • 25.10.2019 Our paper titled Interpretable multiclass classification by MDL-based rule lists, with Hugo Proença, got accepted for publication in Information Sciences. Congratulations Hugo!
  • 01.09.2019 As of today I am programme manager of Leiden University's master's programme in Computer Science.
  • 19.07.2019 Our paper titled Challenges and Limitations in Clustering Blood Donor Hemoglobin Trajectories, with Marieke Vinkenoog and Mart Janssen, got accepted at AALTD 2019. Congratulations Marieke!
  • 22.02.2019 I obtained the BKO, i.e., the University Teaching Qualification for Dutch universities (in Dutch: Basiskwalificatie Onderwijs).
  • 18.01.2019 NWO has awarded me a TOP grant (module 2) for my research proposal titled Human-Guided Data Science by Interactive Model Selection. Read the news article.

I am associate professor and group leader of the Explanatory Data Analysis group at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), the computer science institute of Leiden University. My primary research interest is exploratory data mining: how can we enable domain experts to explore and analyse their data, to discover structure and—ultimately—novel knowledge?

For this it is important that methods and results are explainable to domain experts, who may not be data scientists. My signature approach is to define and identify patterns that matter, i.e., succinct descriptions that characterise relevant structure present in the data. Which patterns matter strongly depends on the data and task at hand, hence defining the problem is one of the key challenges of exploratory data mining. Information theoretic concepts such as the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle have proven very useful to this end. I am also interested in interactive data mining, i.e., involving humans in the loop. Finally, I am interested in fundamental data mining research for real-world applications, both in science (e.g., life sciences, social sciences) and industry (e.g., manufacturing and engineering, aviation), as this is the best way to show that the theory works in practice.

I am affiliated with the Leiden Centre of Data Science (LCDS) and university-wide Data Science Research Programme (DSRP). Broadly speaking, my research can be situated in the fields of data mining, machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence (AI).

see all

Activities

Current and upcoming
  • Keynote talk titled Towards human-guided rule learning at ICFCA 2020 in Strasbourg, France, 29 June - 2 July.
  • Advisory Chair of IDA 2021, which will take place online, 26-28 April 2021.
  • Teacher of Statistics '20-'21 (BSc Computer Science).
Recent
  • Advisory Chair of IDA 2020 in Lake Constance, Germany, 27-29 April 2020.
  • Invited talk at Data Science Center Eindhoven in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 5 March 2020.
  • Teacher of Information Theoretic Data Mining '19-'20 (MSc Computer Science).
  • Keynote at Workshop on Computational Intelligence & Its Applications, in Greater-Noida, India, 15 November 2019.
  • I participated in the CaStleD 2019 workshop on Computation and Statistics in Data science, in Bertinoro, Italy, 30 September - 4 October 2019.
  • I attended ECML PKDD 2019 in Würzburg, Germany, 16 - 20 September 2019.
  • Invited talk at SciCAR 2019, Scientific Computer Assisted Reporting conference, in Dortmund, Germany, 10 September 2019.
  • Committee member at the PhD defence of Sanjar Karaev (with promotors Gerhard Weikum and Pauli Miettinen). Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 10 July 2019.
  • Invited talk at MPI Informatics and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 10 July 2019.

see all

Selected recent publications

In press
Kroes, SKS, Janssen, MP, Groenwold, RHH & van Leeuwen, M Evaluating privacy of individuals in medical data. Health Informatics Journal, SAGE Publications
2021
Marx, A, Yang, L & van Leeuwen, M Estimating Conditional Mutual Information for Discrete-Continuous Mixtures using Multi-Dimensional Adaptive Histograms. In: Proceedings of the SIAM Conference on Data Mining 2021 (SDM'21), SIAM, 2021.website
Kapoor, S, Saxena, DK & van Leeuwen, M Online Summarization of Dynamic Graphs using Subjective Interestingness for Sequential Data. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery vol.35(1), pp 88-126, 2021. (ECML PKDD journal track)
2020
Gawehns, D & van Leeuwen, M Social Fluidity in Children's Face-to-Face Interaction Networks. In: Proceedings of the Graph Embedding and Mining (GEM) Workshop at ECML PKDD 2020, 2020.website
Proença, HM, Grünwald, P, Bäck, T & van Leeuwen, M Discovering Outstanding Subgroup Lists for Numeric Targets using MDL. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD 2020), Springer, 2020.implementationwebsite
Vinkenoog, M, van den Hurk, K, van Kraaij, M, van Leeuwen, M & Janssen, M First results of a ferritin-based blood donor deferral policy in the Netherlands. Transfusion vol.60(8), pp 1785-1792, Wiley, 2020.
Faas, M & van Leeuwen, M Vouw: Geometric Pattern Mining using the MDL Principle. In: Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA 2020), Springer, 2020.
Gautrais, C, Cellier, P, van Leeuwen, M & Termier, A Widening for MDL-based Retail Signature Discovery. In: Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA 2020), Springer, 2020.
Kapoor, S, Saxena, DK & van Leeuwen, M Discovering Subjectively Interesting Multigraph Patterns. Machine Learning, pp 1-28, Springer
Proença, HM & van Leeuwen, M Interpretable multiclass classification by MDL-based rule lists. Information Sciences vol.512, pp 1372-1393, Elsevier, 2020.
implementationwebsite