Mining negative generalized knowledge from relational databases

Attribute-oriented induction (AOI) is a useful data mining method for extracting generalized knowledge from relational data and users' background knowledge. Concept hierarchies can be integrated with the AOI method to induce multi-level generalized knowledge. However, the existing AOI approaches are only capable of mining positive knowledge from databases; thus, rare but important negative generalized knowledge that is unknown, unexpected, or contradictory to what the user believes, can be missed. In this study, we propose a global negative attribute-oriented induction (GNAOI) approach that can generate comprehensive and multiple-level negative generalized knowledge at the same time. Two pruning properties, the downward level closure property and the upward superset closure property, are employed to improve the efficiency of the algorithm, and a new interest measure, nim(cl), is exploited to measure the degree of the negative relation. Experiment results from a real-life dataset show that the proposed method is effective in finding global negative generalized knowledge. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.