Patent ID: 7177864

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for analyzing a data source to find association relationships between attributes recorded in the data source, comprising: (a) receiving two or more data records, each record containing one or more of attributes of interest; (b) defining at least two attribute k-patterns by reference to a subset of the attributes, where k is an integer and represents the number of attributes that are included in a k-pattern and k is assigned at least two non-zero integer values; (c) using an invertible, mathematically closed-form mapping algorithm, in the form of: S + ∑ α = 1 k ⁢ ( w α α ) . where: S is any number used as an offset, including 0; k is an integer >0; α is an integer index of summation >0 and less than or equal to k; w α are integer representations of records or items within the data source, mapping each of the at least two attribute k-patterns into an associated unique key; (d) determining a distribution pattern for each of the at least two attribute k-patterns defined in step (b); (e) inverting the mapping to decode from the keys to the associated attribute k-pattern; and (f) using the keys, associating the distribution patterns determined with each of the at least two attribute k-patterns.