Record linkage identifies multiple records referring to the same entity even if they are not bit-wise identical. It is thus an essential technology for data integration and data cleansing. Existing record linkage approaches are mainly relying on similarity functions based on the surface forms of the records, and hence are not able to identify complex coreference records. This seriously limits t...

Several business applications such as marketing basket analysis, clickstream analysis, fraud detection and churning migration analysis demand gradient data analysis. By employing gradient data analysis one is able to identify trends, outliers and answering “what-if” questions over large databases. Gradient queries were first introduced by Imielinski et al [1] as the cubegrade problem. The main ...

Mining sequential rules requires specifying parameters that are often difficult to set (the minimal confidence and minimal support). Depending on the choice of these parameters, 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 reso...

In many applications, users specify target values for certain attributes, without requiring exact matches to these values in return. Instead, the result to such queries is typically a rank of the “top k” tuples that best match the given attribute values. In this paper, we study the advantages and limitations of processing a top-k query by translating it into a single range query that traditiona...