Foundations of rule learning Rules the clearest most explored and best understood form of knowledge representation are particularly important for data mining as they offer the best tradeoff between human and machine understandability. This book presents the fundamentals of rule learning as investigated in classical machine learning and modern data mining. It introduces a feature based view as a unifying framework for propositional and relational rule learning thus bridging the gap between attribute value learning and inductive logic programming and providing complete coverage of most important elements of rule learning.The book can be used as a textbook for teaching machine learning as well as a comprehensive reference to research in the field of inductive rule learning. As such it targets students researchers and developers of rule learning algorithms presenting the fundamental rule learning concepts in sufficient breadth and depth to enable the reader to understand develop and apply rule learning techniques to real world data.