Fast discovery of representative association rules

Abstract

Discovering association rules among items in a large database is an important database mining problem. The number of association rules may be huge. To alleviate this problem, we introduced in [1] a notion of representative association rules. Representative association rules are a least set of rules that covers all association rules satisfying certain user specified constraints. The association rules, which are not representative ones, may be generated by means of a cover operator without accessing a database. In this paper, we investigate properties of representative association rules and offer a new efficient algorithm computing such rules.