On the complexity of inducing categorical and quantitative association rules

  • Authors:
  • Fabrizio Angiulli;Giovambattista Ianni;Luigi Palopoli

  • Affiliations:
  • ICAR-CNR, c/o DEIS, Università della Calabria, Via Pietro Bucci, 41C, 87036 Rende (CS), Italy;Dipartimento di Matematica, Università della Calabria, Via Pietro Bucci, 30B, 87036 Rende (CS), Italy;DIMET, Università di Reggio Calabria, Via Graziella, Loc. Feo di Vito, 89100 Reggio Calabria (RC), Italy

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 5.24

Visualization

Abstract

Inducing association rules is one of the central tasks in data mining applications. Quantitative association rules induced from databases describe rich and hidden relationships to be found within data that can prove useful for various application purposes (e.g., market basket analysis, customer profiling, and others). Although association rules are quite widely used in practice, a thorough analysis of the related computational complexity is missing. This paper intends to provide a contribution in this setting. To this end, we first formally define quantitative association rule mining problems, which include boolean association rules as a special case; we then analyze computational complexity of such problems. The general problem as well as some interesting special cases are considered.