Fuzzy Association Rules to Summarise Multiple Taxonomies in Large Databases

A key feature of human intelligence is our ability to categorise and summarise large quantities of data, whether this data arises from sensory input or from other sources. The ability to group multiple entities together into an (approximately) uniform whole allows us to efficiently represent a whole group as a single concept, enabling us to reason, and to derive knowledge, about groups of entities. A simple form of derived knowledge is association essentially, that the extensions of two concepts overlap significantly. One of the fundamental tenets underlying fuzzy set theory (Zadeh, 1965) is the idea that humans work with groups of entities (or conceptual categories) that are loosely defined, able to admit elements according to some scale of membership rather than according to an absolute yes/no test. This AbsTRACT