XML-Enabled Association Analysis

The discovery of association rules from large amounts of structured or semi-structured data is an important data mining problem [Agrawal et al. 1993, Agrawal and Srikant 1994, Miyahara et al. 2001, Termier et al. 2002, Braga et al. 2002, Cong et al. 2002, Braga et al. 2003, Xiao et al. 2003, Maruyama and Uehara 2000, Wang and Liu 2000]. It has crucial applications in decision support and marketing strategy. The most prototypical application of association rules is market basket analysis using transaction databases from supermarkets. These databases contain sales transaction records, each of which details items bought by a customer in the transaction. Mining association rules is the process of discovering knowledge such as “80% of customers who bought diapers also bought beer, and 35% of customers bought both diapers and beer”, which can be expressed as “diaper ? beer” (35%, 80%), where 80% is the confidence level of the rule, and 35% is the support level of the rule indicating how frequently the customers bought both diapers and beer. In general, an association rule takes the form X ? Y (s, c), where X and Y are sets of items, and s and c are support and confidence, respectively. In the XML Era, mining association rules is confronted with more challenges than in the traditional well-structured world due to the inherent flexibilities of XML in both structure and semantics [Feng and Dillon 2005]. First, XML data has a more complex hierarchical structure than a database record. Second, elements in XML data have contextual positions, which thus carry the order notion. Third, XML data appears to be much bigger than traditional data. To address these challenges, the classic association rule mining framework originating with transactional databases needs to be re-examined.