Milling of multi-relational association rules

Association rule mining is one of the most important and basic technique in data mining, which has been studied extensively and has a wide range of applications. However, as traditional data mining algorithms usually only focus on analyzing data organized in single table, applying these algorithms in multi-relational data environment will result in many problems. This paper summarizes these problems, proposes a framework for the mining of multi-relational association rule, and gives a definition of the mining task. After classifying the existing work into two categories, it describes the main techniques used in several typical algorithms, and it also makes comparison and analysis among them. Finally, it points out some issues unsolved and some future further research work in this area.