A Three-phased Online Association Rule Mining Approach for Diverse Mining Requests

In the past, most incremental mining and online mining algorithms considered finding the set of association rules or patterns consistent with the entire set of data inserted so far. Users can not easily obtain the results from their only interested portion of data. For providing ad-hoc, query-driven and online mining supports, we first propose a relation called multidimensional pattern relation to structurally and systematically store the context information and the mining information for later analysis. Each tuple in the relation comes from an inserted dataset in the database. This concept is similar to the construction of a data warehouse for OLAP. However, unlike the summarized information of fact attributes in a data warehouse, the mined patterns in the multidimensional pattern relation can not be directly aggregated to satisfy users’ mining requests. We then develop an online mining approach called Three-phased Online Association Rule Mining (TOARM) based on the proposed multidimensional pattern relation to support online generation of association rules under multidimensional considerations. Experiments for both homogeneous and heterogeneous datasets are made, with results showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.