Mining knowledge at multiple concept levels

Abstract

Most studies on data mining have been focused at mining rules at single concept levels, i.e., either at the primitive level or at a rather high concept level. However, it is often desirable to discover knowledge at multiple concept levels. Mining knowledge at multiple levels may help database users find some interesting rules which are difficult to be discovered otherwise and view database contents at different abstraction levels and from different angles. Methods for mining knowledge at multiple concept levels can often be developed by extension of existing data mining techniques. Moreover, for efficient processing and interactive mining of multiple-level rules, it is often necessary to adopt techniques such as step-by-step generalization/specialization or progressive deepening of a knowledge mining process. Other issues, such as visual representation of knowledge at multiple levels, and 'redundant' rule filtering, should also be studied in depth.