How Good are Association-rule Mining Algorithms ?

Abstract

We address the question of how much space remains for performance improvement over current association rule mining algorithms. Our approach is to compare their performance against an "Oracle algorithm" that knows in advance the identities of all frequent itemsets in the database and only needs to gather the actual supports of these itemsets, in one scan over the database, to complete the mining process. Clearly, any practical algorithm will have to do at least this much work in order to generate mining rules