Mining association rules from XML data

Abstract

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) rapidly emerged as a standard for representing and exchanging information. The fast-growing amount of available XML data sets a pressing need for languages and tools to manage collections of XML documents, as well as to mine interesting information out of them. Although the data mining community has not yet rushed into the use of XML, there have been some proposals to exploit XML. However, in practice these proposals mainly rely on more or less traditional relational databases with an XML interface. In this paper, we introduce association rules from native XML documents and discuss the new challenges and opportunities that this topic sets to the data mining community. More specifically, we introduce an extension of XQuery for mining association rules. This extension is used throughout the paper to better define association rule mining within XML and to emphasize its implications in the XML context. © 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.