This paper is concerned with data mining techniques for identifying the main parameters of the printing press, the printing process and paper affecting the occurrence of paper web breaks in a pressroom.Two approaches are explored. The first one treats the problem as a task of data classification into “break” and “non break” classes. The procedures of classifier design and selection of relevant input variables are integrated into one process based on genetic search. The search process results in a set of input variables providing the lowest average loss incurred in taking decisions. The second approach, also based on genetic search, combines procedures of input variable selection and data mapping into a low dimensional space. The tests have shown that the web tension parameters are amongst the most important ones. It was also found that, provided the basic off-line paper parameters are in an acceptable range, the paper related parameters recorded online contain more information for predicting the occurrence of web breaks than the off-line ones. Using the selected set of parameters, on average, 93.7% of the test set data were classified correctly. The average classification accuracy of the break cases was equal to 76.7%.