Book excerpt: The Fifth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining continues the tradition of providing an open forum for the presentation and discussion of innovative algorithms as well as novel applications of data mining. Advances in information technology and data collection methods have led to the availability of large data sets in commercial enterprises and in a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. The field of data mining draws upon extensive work in areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, and high performance computing to discover interesting and previously unknown information in data. This conference results in data mining, including applications, algorithms, software, and systems.