Patent ID: 7269586

Claim:
In a computer system having a large disk resident data set, a method of analyzing the disk resident data set using a patient rule induction method (PRIM), the method comprising steps of: (a) receiving a meta parameter and a relational data table comprised of continuous attributes, discrete attributes and a cost attribute, wherein the cost attribute represents cost output values based on continuous attributes values and discrete attribute values as inputs; (b) defining a hyper-rectangle enclosing a multi-dimensional space defined by the continuous attribute values and the discrete attribute values, wherein the continuous attribute values and the discrete attribute values are represented as points within the multi-dimensional space, further including steps of: (i) separating the data into at least three lists, including a continuous attribute list for each continuous attribute containing the continuous attribute values, a discrete attribute list containing the discrete attributes and the discrete attribute values, and a cost attribute list containing the cost output values; (ii) adding a label to each of the continuous attribute lists, the discrete attribute list and the cost attribute list, such that the label is an index of a tuple to which the respective attribute value belongs within the relational data table; (iii) sorting the continuous attribute lists based on a continuous attribute value in each row of the continuous attribute lists; and (iv) adding a label to the cost list, such that the label is a cost flag that indicates whether the tuple containing the cost output value is enclosed within the hyper-rectangle, such that the cost flag is initially set to one; (c) removing a plurality of points along edges of the hyper-rectangle based on an average of the cost output value from the plurality of points until a count of the points enclosed within the hyper-rectangle equals the meta parameter; and (d) adding removed discrete attribute value points and the continuous attribute value points along the edges of the hyper-rectangle until a sum of the cost output values over the multi-dimensional space enclosed by the hyper-rectangle changes.