SCI-tree: An incremental algorithm for computing support counts of all closed intervals from an interval dataset

Abstract

Interval data mining is used to extract unknown patterns, hidden rules, associations etc. associated in interval based data. The extraction of closed interval is important because by mining the set of closed intervals and their support counts, the support counts of any interval can be computed easily. In this work an incremental algorithm for computing closed intervals together with their support counts from interval dataset is proposed. Many methods for mining closed intervals are available. Most of these methods assume a static data set as input and hence the algorithms are non-incremental. Real life data sets are however dynamic by nature. An efficient incremental algorithm called CI-Tree has been already proposed for computing closed intervals present in dynamic interval data. However this method could not compute the support values of the closed intervals. The proposed algorithm called SCI-Tree extracts all closed intervals together with their support values incrementally from the given interval data. Also, all the frequent closed intervals can be computed for any user defined minimum support with a single scan of SCI-Tree without revisiting the dataset. The proposed method has been tested with real life and synthetic datasets and results have been reported.