There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. Karl Marx A Universial Genius of the 19th Century Many scientists from all over the world during the past two years since the MLDM 2007 have come along on the stony way to the sunny summit of science and have worked hard on new ideas and applications in the area of data mining in pattern r- ognition. Our thanks go to all those who took part in this year's MLDM. We appre- ate their submissions and the ideas shared with the Program Committee. We received over 205 submissions from all over the world to the International Conference on - chine Learning and Data Mining, MLDM 2009. The Program Committee carefully selected the best papers for this year's program and gave detailed comments on each submitted paper. There were 63 papers selected for oral presentation and 17 papers for poster presentation. The topics range from theoretical topics for classification, clustering, association rule and pattern mining to specific data-mining methods for the different multimedia data types such as image mining, text mining, video mining and Web mining. Among these topics this year were special contributions to subtopics such as attribute discre- zation and data preparation, novelty and outlier detection, and distances and simila- ties.