Association Rule Mining of Relational Data
As shown, an instance for a pattern with no unipartite
edges can be arbitrarily extended to instances of a
larger pattern. In order to solve this problem, a pat-
tern constraint must be introduced that requires valid
patterns to at least have one unipartite edge connected
to each entity node.
Related Research Areas
A related area of research is graph-based pattern min-
ing. Traditional graph-based pattern mining does not
produce association rules but rather focuses on the task
of frequent subgraph discovery. Most graph-based
methods consider a single label or attribute per node.
When there are multiple attributes, the data are either
modeled with zero or one label per node or as a bipar-
tite graph. One graph-based task addresses multiple
graph transactions where the data are a set of graphs
(Inokuchi et al, 2000; Yan and Han, 2002; Kuramochi
& Karypis, 2004; Hasan et al, 2007). Since each record
or transaction is a graph, a subgraph pattern is counted
once for each graph in which it exists at least once. In
that sense transactional methods are not much different
than single-table item set methods.
Single graph settings differ from transactional set-
tings since they contain only one input graph rather than
a set of graphs (Kuramochi & Karypis, 2005; Vanetik,
2006; Chen et al, 2007). They cannot use simple
existence of a subgraph as the aggregation function;
otherwise the pattern supports would be either one or
zero. If all examples were counted without aggregation
then the problem would no longer satisfy downward
closure. Instead, only those instances are counted as
discussed in the previous section.
In relational pattern mining multiple items or at-
tributes are associated with each node and the main
challenge is to achieve scaling with respect to the
number of items per node. Scaling to large subgraphs is
usually less relevant due to the “small world” property
of many types of graphs. For most networks of practi-
cal interest any node can be reached from almost any
other by means of no more than some small number of
edges (Barabasi & Bonabeau, 2003). Association rules
that involve longer distances are therefore unlikely to
produce meaningful results.
There are other areas of research on ARM in which
related transactions are mined in some combined fash-
ion. Sequential pattern or episode mining (Agrawal
& Srikant 1995; Yan, Han, & Afshar, 2003) and inter-
transaction mining (Tung et al., 1999) are two main
categories. Generally the interest in association rule A
mining is moving beyond the single-table setting to
incorporate the complex requirements of real-world
data.
FUTURE TRENDS
The consensus in the data mining community of the
importance of relational data mining was recently para-
phrased by Dietterich (2003) as “I.i.d. learning is dead.
Long live relational learning”. The statistics, machine
learning, and ultimately data mining communities have
invested decades into sound theories based on a single
table. It is now time to afford as much rigor to relational
data. When taking this step it is important to not only
specify generalizations of existing algorithms but to
also identify novel questions that may be asked that
are specific to the relational setting. It is, furthermore,
important to identify challenges that only occur in the
relational setting, including skewing due to traversal
of the relational link structure and correlations that are
frequent in relational neighbors.
CONCLUSION
Association rule mining of relational data is a power-
ful frequent pattern mining technique that is useful
for several data structures including graphs. Two
main approaches are distinguished. Inductive logic
programming provides a high degree of flexibility,
while mining of joined relations is a fast technique
that allows the study of problems related to skewed
or uninteresting results. The potential computational
complexity of relational algorithms and specific prop-
erties of relational data make its mining an important
current research topic. Association rule mining takes
a special role in this process, being one of the most
important frequent pattern algorithms.
REFERENCES
Agrawal, R. & Srikant, R. (1994). Fast Algorithms for
Mining Association Rules in Large Databases. In Pro-
ceedings of the 20th international Conference on Very
Large Data Bases, San Francisco, CA, 487-499.