Efficient Graph-Based Algorithm for Discovering and Maintaining Knowledge in Large Databases

In this paper, we study the issues of mining and maintaining association rules in a large database of customer transactions. The problem of mining association rules can be mapped into the problems of finding large itemsets which are sets of items bought together in a sufficient number of transactions. We revise a graph-based algorithm to further speed up the process of itemset generation. In addition, we extend our revised algorithm to maintain discovered association rules when incremental or decremental updates are made to the databases. Experimental results show the efficiency of our algorithms. The revised algorithm significantly improves over the original one on mining association rules. The algorithms for maintaining association rules are more efficient than re-running the mining algorithms for the whole updated database and outperform previously proposed algorithms that need multiple passes over the database.