Discarding Insignificant Rules during Impact Rule Discovery in Large, Dense Databases

Considerable progress has been made on how to reduce the number of spurious exploratory rules with quantitative attributes. However, little has been done for rules with undiscretized quantitative attributes. It is argued that propositional rules can not effectively describe the interactions between quantitative and qualitative attributes. Aumann and Lindell proposed quantitative association rules to provide a better description of such relationship, together with a rule pruning techniques . Since their technique is based on the frequent itemset framework, it is not suitable for rule discovery in large, dense databases. In this paper, an efficient technique for automatically discarding insignificant rules during rule discovery is proposed, based on the OPUS search algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that the algorithm we propose can efficiently remove potentially uninteresting rules even in very large, dense databases.