The 2001 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM '01) provides a forum for the sharing of original research results and practical development experiences among researchers and application developers from different data mining related areas such as machine learning, automated scientific discovery, statistics, pattern recognition, knowledge acquisition, soft computing, databases and data warehousing, data visualization, and knowledge-based systems. The conference seeks solutions to challenging problems facing the development of data mining systems, and shapes future directions of research by promoting high quality, novel and daring research findings. As an important part of the conference, the workshops program will focus on new research challenges and initiatives.