Propositionalisation and Aggregates

The fact that data is scattered over many tables causes many problems in the practice of data mining. To deal with this problem, one either constructs a single table by hand, or one uses a Multi-Relational Data Mining algorithm. In this paper, we propose a different approach in which the single table is constructed automatically using aggregate functions, which repeatedly summarise information from different tables over associations in the datamodel. Following the construction of the single table, we apply traditional data mining algorithms. Next to an in-depth discussion of our approach, the paper presents results of experiments on three well-known data sets.