Patent ID: 7346601

Claim:
A computer implemented method for evaluating a user query on a database having a mining model that classifies records contained in the database into classes and assigns a class label to each record, wherein the query comprises at least one mining predicate that refers to a class label of database records, the method comprising the steps of: deriving an upper envelope for the class label referred to by the mining predicate wherein the upper envelope is a query predicate of the form M c ({right arrow over (x)}) which corresponds to a query predicate that returns a set of database records that includes all of the database records having that class label assigned thereto; and including the upper envelope with the user query for query evaluation of the user query on the database records of the database; wherein the deriving step is performed during a preprocessing phase by: building a mining model; evaluating the mining model to extract a set of classes and class labels for the database records; deriving an upper envelope for each class label while building the model; and storing the upper envelopes for access during user query evaluation.