Fast discovery of interesting rules

Extracting interesting rules from databases is an important field of knowledge discovery. Typically, enormous number of rules are embedded in a database and one of the essential abilities of discovery systems is to evaluate interestingness of rules to filter out less interesting rules. This paper proposes a new criterion of rule's interestingness based on its exceptionality. This criterion evaluates exceptionality of rules by comparing their accuracy with those of simpler and more general rules. We also propose a disovery algorithm, DIG, to extract interesting rules with respect to the criterion effectively.