Patent ID: 7668793

Claim:
A computerized data mining method for determining association rules within N transactions stored in transaction records of a client computer, said method comprising: computing, by the client computer, a minimum sample size n* of said N transactions, each transaction comprising p different items for characterizing each transaction, p being at least 2, wherein said minimum sample size n* is determined based on a multivariate estimation analysis for achieving precision requirements; receiving, by a server computer, a sample of n transactions that had been transmitted across a communication network from the client computer to the server computer after the client computer had drawn the n transactions from the N transactions based on the computed n*, wherein n is at least n* and less than N; computing association rules based on the sample of n transactions according to a methodology for mining of association rules, said computed association rules being an estimation of association rules of said N transactions, said computing association rules being performed by the server computer, said computing association rules based on the sample of n transactions of said N transactions resulting in a reduction in processing time for computing the association rules as compared with computing the association rules based on the N transactions; and sending, by the server computer, the computed association rules across the communication network to a memory of the client computer for subsequent usage by the client computer, wherein said precision requirements comprise: a confidence level (1−α) for the minimum sample size n*, wherein α is a specified probability of an error for the minimum sample size n*; and a relative precision ε k for an item k of a sample, said relative precision ε k defining an acceptable deviation of the support value of item k within the sample of n transactions of said N transactions as compared to the support value of item k within said N transactions, said relative precision ε k being measured relative to the standard deviation of the support value of item k.