An incremental updating technique is developed for maintenance of the association rules discovered by database mining. There have been many studies on efficient discovery of association rules in large databases. However, it is nontrivial to maintain such discovered rules in large databases because a database may allow frequent or occasional updates and such updates may not only invalidate some existing strong association rules but also turn some weak rules into strong ones. In this study, an incremental updating technique is proposed for efficient maintenance of dis- covered association rules when new transaction data are added to a transaction database.

Abstract. Spatial data mining, i.e., discovery of interesting, implicit knowledge in spatial databases, is an important task for understanding and use of spatial data- and knowledge-bases. In this paper, an e cient method for mining strong spatial association rules in geographic information databases is proposed and studied. A spatial association rule is a rule indicating certain association relationship among a set of spatial and possibly some nonspatial predicates. A strong rule indicates that the patterns in the rule have relatively frequent occurrences in the database and strong implication relationships. Several optimization techniques are explored, including a two-step spatial computation technique (approximate computation on large sets, and re ned computations on small promising patterns), shared processing in the derivation of large predicates at multiple concept levels, etc. Our analysis shows that interesting association rules can be discovered e ciently in large spatial databases. 1

Data mining evolved as a collection of applicative problems and efficient solution algorithms relative to rather peculiar problems, all focused on the discovery of relevant information hidden in databases of huge dimensions. In particular, one of the most investigated topics is the discovery of association rules. This work proposes a unifying model that enables a uniform description of the problem of discovering association rules. The model provides SQL-like operator, named MINE RULE, which is capable of expressing all the problems presented so far in the literature concerning the mining of association rules. We demonstrate the expressive power of the new operator by means of several examples, some of which are classical, while some others are fully original and correspond to novel and unusual applications. We also present the operational semantics of the operator by means of an extended relational algebra. 1 Introduction Data Mining is a novel research area that develops tech- Pe...

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One of the important problems in data mining is discovering association rules from databases of transactions where each transaction consists of a set of items. The most time consuming operation in this discovery process is the computation of the frequency of the occurrences of interesting subset of items (called candidates) in the database of transactions. To prune the exponentially large space of candidates, most existing algorithms, consider only those candidates that have a user defined minimum support. Even with the pruning, the task of finding all association rules requires a lot of computation power and time. Parallel computers offer a potential solution to the computation requirement of this task, provided efficient and scalable parallel algorithms can be designed. In this paper, we present two new parallel algorithms for mining association rules. The Intelligent Data Distribution algorithm efficiently uses aggregate memory of the parallel computer by employing intelligent candi...

As a con#uence of data mining and WWW technologies, it is now possible to perform data mining on web logrecords collectedfrom the Internet web page access history. The behaviour of the web page readers is imprinted in the web server log #les. Analyzing and exploring regularities in this behaviour can improve system performance, enhance the quality and delivery of Internet information services to the end user, and identify population of potential customers for electronic commerce. Thus, by observing people using collections of data, data mining can bring considerable contribution to digital library designers.

Abstract—In this paper, we explore a new data mining capability that involves mining path traversal patterns in a distributed information-providing environment where documents or objects are linked together to facilitate interactive access. Our solution procedure consists of two steps. First, we derive an algorithm to convert the original sequence of log data into a set of maximal forward references. By doing so, we can filter out the effect of some backward references, which are mainly made for ease of traveling and concentrate on mining meaningful user access sequences. Second, we derive algorithms to determine the frequent traversal patterns¦i.e., large reference sequences¦from the maximal forward references obtained. Two algorithms are devised for determining large reference sequences; one is based on some hashing and pruning techniques, and the other is further improved with the option of determining large reference sequences in batch so as to reduce the number of database scans required. Performance of these two methods is comparatively analyzed. It is shown that the option of selective scan is very advantageous and can lead to prominent performance improvement. Sensitivity analysis on various parameters is conducted. Index Terms—Data mining, traversal patterns, distributed information system, World Wide Web, performance analysis.

Partial periodicity search, i.e., search for partial periodic patterns in time-series databases, is an interesting data mining problem. Previous studies on periodicity search mainly consider finding full periodic patterns, where every point in time contributes (precisely or approximately) to the periodicity. However, partial periodicity is very common in practice since it is more likely that only some of the time episodes may exhibit periodic patterns. We present several algorithms for efficient mining of partial periodic patterns, by exploring some interesting properties related to partial periodicity, such as the Apriori property and the max-subpattern hit set property, and by shared mining of multiple periods. The max-subpattern hit set property is a vital new property which allows us to derive the counts of all frequent patterns from a relatively small subset of patterns existing in the time series. We show that mining partial periodicity needs only two scans over the time series database, even for mining multiple periods. The performance study shows our proposed methods are very efficient in mining long periodic patterns.

The emerging data mining tools and systems lead naturally to the demand of a powerful data mining query language, on top of which manyinteractive and #exible graphical user interfaces can be developed. This motivates us to design a data mining query language, DMQL, for mining di#erent kinds of knowledge in relational databases. Portions of the proposed DMQL language have been implemented in our DBMiner system for interactive mining of multiple-level knowledge in relational databases. 1 Introduction Data mining is a promising #eld with #ourishing R

Association rules are a fundamental class of patterns that exist in data. The key strength of association rule mining is its completeness. It finds all associations in the data that satisfy the user specified minimum support and minimum confidence constraints. This strength, however, comes with a major drawback. It often produces a huge number of associations. This is particularly true for data sets whose attributes are highly correlated. The huge number of associations makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for a human user to analyze in order to identify those interesting/useful ones. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to overcome this problem. The technique first prunes the discovered associations to remove those insignificant associations, and then finds a special subset of the unpruned associations to form a summary of the discovered associations. We call this subset of associations the direction setting (DS) rules as they set the directions that are followed by the...