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 ad...

Association rule mining finds interesting associations and/or correlation relationships among large set of data items. However, when the number of association rules become large, it becomes less interesting to the user. It is crucial to help the decision-maker with an efficient postprocessing step in order to select interesting association rules throughout huge volumes of discovered rules. This...

The discovery of association rules has been known to be useful in selective marketing, decision analysis, and business management. An important application area of mining association rules is the market basket analysis, which studies the buying behaviors of customers by searching for sets of items that are frequently purchased together. With the increasing use of the record-based databases whos...

Frequent item sets mining plays an important role in association rules mining. A variety of algorithms for finding frequent item sets in very large transaction databases have been developed. Although many techniques were proposed for maintenance of the discovered rules when new transactions are added, little work is done for maintaining the discovered rules when some transactions are deleted fr...

We develop techniques for discovering patterns with periodicity in this work. Patterns with periodicity are those that occur at regular time intervals, and therefore there are two aspects to the problem: finding the pattern, and determining the periodicity. The difficulty of the task lies in the problem of discovering these regular time intervals, i.e., the periodicity. Periodicities in the dat...

Association rule mining typically results in large amounts of redundant rules. We introduce efficient methods for deriving tight bounds for confidences of association rules, given their subrules. If the lower and upper bounds of a rule coincide, the confidence is uniquely determined by the subrules and the rule can be pruned as redundant, or derivable, without any loss of information. Experimen...

Mining association rules is a fundamental data mining task. However, depending on the choice of the parameters (the minimum confidence and minimum support), current algorithms can become very slow and generate an extremely large amount of results or generate too few results, omitting valuable information. This is a serious problem because in practice users have limited resources for analyzing t...

This paper introduces a new approach to a problem of data sharing among multiple parties, without disclosing the data between the parties. Our focus is data sharing among two parties involved in a data mining task. We study how to share private or confidential data in the following scenario: two parties, each having a private data set, want to collaboratively conduct association rule mining wit...

We consider the problem of mining association rules on a shared-nothing multiprocessor. We present three algorithms that explore a spectrum of trade-oos between computation, communication, memory usage, synchronization, and the use of problem-speciic information. The best algorithm exhibits near perfect scaleup behavior, yet requires only minimal overhead compared to the current best serial alg...

The discovery of association rules showing conditions of data co-occurrence has attracted the most attention in data mining. An example of an association rule is the rule “the customer who bought bread and butter also bought milk,” expressed by T(bread; butter)→T(milk). Let I ={x1,x2,...,xm} be a set of (data) items, called the domain; let D be a collection of records (transactions), where each...