Set-oriented mining for association rules in relational databases

Abstract

Describe set-oriented algorithms for mining association rules. Such algorithms imply performing multiple joins and may appear to be inherently less efficient than special-purpose algorithms. We develop new algorithms that can be expressed as SQL queries, and discuss the optimization of these algorithms. After analytical evaluation, an algorithm named SETM emerges as the algorithm of choice. SETM uses only simple database primitives, viz. sorting and merge-scan join. SETM is simple, fast and stable over the range of parameter values. The major contribution of this paper is that it shows that at least some aspects of data mining can be carried out by using general query languages such as SQL, rather than by developing specialized black-box algorithms. The set-oriented nature of SETM facilitates the development of extensions.<>