  The notion of meta-mining has appeared recently and extends the traditional
meta-learning in two ways. First it does not learn meta-models that provide
support only for the learning algorithm selection task but ones that support
the whole data-mining process. In addition it abandons the so called black-box
approach to algorithm description followed in meta-learning. Now in addition to
the datasets, algorithms also have descriptors, workflows as well. For the
latter two these descriptions are semantic, describing properties of the
algorithms. With the availability of descriptors both for datasets and data
mining workflows the traditional modelling techniques followed in
meta-learning, typically based on classification and regression algorithms, are
no longer appropriate. Instead we are faced with a problem the nature of which
is much more similar to the problems that appear in recommendation systems. The
most important meta-mining requirements are that suggestions should use only
datasets and workflows descriptors and the cold-start problem, e.g. providing
workflow suggestions for new datasets.
  In this paper we take a different view on the meta-mining modelling problem
and treat it as a recommender problem. In order to account for the meta-mining
specificities we derive a novel metric-based-learning recommender approach. Our
method learns two homogeneous metrics, one in the dataset and one in the
workflow space, and a heterogeneous one in the dataset-workflow space. All
learned metrics reflect similarities established from the dataset-workflow
preference matrix. We demonstrate our method on meta-mining over biological
(microarray datasets) problems. The application of our method is not limited to
the meta-mining problem, its formulations is general enough so that it can be
applied on problems with similar requirements.
