Maintenance of discovered association rules in large databases: an incremental updating technique

An incremental updating technique is developed for maintenance of the association rules discovered by database mining. There have been many studies on efficient discovery of association rules in large databases. However, it is nontrivial to maintain such discovered rules in large databases because a database may allow frequent or occasional updates and such updates may not only invalidate some existing strong association rules but also turn some weak rules into strong ones. An incremental updating technique is proposed for efficient maintenance of discovered association rules when new transaction data are added to a transaction database.