Knowledge discovery used to be a big part of ML, and the KDD conference included papers on association rules, clustering, rule learning, interpretable classifie

Knowledge discovery used to be a big part of ML, and the KDD conference included papers on association rules, clustering, rule learning, interpretable classifiers, etc. In my experience, even with predictive analytics the knowledge discovered along the way was often as valuable as the final application --- although it's easier to sell a predictive capability than "we're going to find something interesting in your data."