Interactive Constrained Association Rule Mining

We investigate ways to support interactive mining sessions, in the setting of association rule mining. In such sessions, users specify conditions (queries) on the associations to be generated. Our approach is a combination of the integration of querying conditions inside the mining phase, and the incremental querying of already generated associations. We present several concrete algorithms and compare their performance.Comment: A preliminary report on this work was presented at the Second International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (DaWaK 2000

On the Complexity of Rule Discovery from Distributed Data

This paper analyses the complexity of rule selection for supervised learning in distributed scenarios. The selection of rules is usually guided by a utility measure such as predictive accuracy or weighted relative accuracy. Other examples are support and confidence, known from association rule mining. A common strategy to tackle rule selection from distributed data is to evaluate rules locally on each dataset. While this works well for homogeneously distributed data, this work proves limitations of this strategy if distributions are allowed to deviate. To identify those subsets for which local and global distributions deviate may be regarded as an interesting learning task of its own, explicitly taking the locality of data into account. This task can be shown to be basically as complex as discovering the globally best rules from local data. Based on the theoretical results some guidelines for algorithm design are derived. --

Explicit probabilistic models for databases and networks

Recent work in data mining and related areas has highlighted the importance of the statistical assessment of data mining results. Crucial to this endeavour is the choice of a non-trivial null model for the data, to which the found patterns can be contrasted. The most influential null models proposed so far are defined in terms of invariants of the null distribution. Such null models can be used by computation intensive randomization approaches in estimating the statistical significance of data mining results. Here, we introduce a methodology to construct non-trivial probabilistic models based on the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) principle. We show how MaxEnt models allow for the natural incorporation of prior information. Furthermore, they satisfy a number of desirable properties of previously introduced randomization approaches. Lastly, they also have the benefit that they can be represented explicitly. We argue that our approach can be used for a variety of data types. However, for concreteness, we have chosen to demonstrate it in particular for databases and networks.Comment: Submitte