Patent ID: 7243100

Claim:
A method of mining attribute associations in a relational data set, comprising the steps of: inputting multiple items from the relational data set; discovering attribute associations using: (i) multi-attribute mining templates formed from at least a portion of the multiple items, wherein each multi-attribute mining template comprises at least one item described by at least two attributes; and (ii) one or more mining preferences specified by a user, wherein the one or more mining preferences specified by the user comprise specification of at least one of: (a) one or more desired multi-attribute mining templates; (b) one or more irrelevant multi-attribute mining templates; and (c) one or more rules concerning values of attributes in the multi-attribute mining templates, further wherein the attribute association discovering step further comprises generating candidate patterns at a template level, wherein candidate patterns of multi-attribute mining templates are derived by merge-joining patterns of nodes of at least a portion of the templates without pre-sorting; and outputting the discovered attribute associations to at least one of the user and another system; wherein the multi-attribute mining templates are related by an anti-monotonicity property such that the property holds when mining top-down from k-itemsets to (k+1)-itemsets and when mining items defined by a set of k attributes to items defined by k+1 attributes.