Discovering Functional Dependencies and Association Rules by Navigating in a Lattice of OLAP Views

Discovering dependencies in data is a well-know problem in database theory. The most common rules are Functional Dependencies (FDs), Conditional Functional Dependencies (CFDs) and Association Rules (ARs). Many tools can display those rules as lists, but those lists are often too long for inspection by users. We propose a new way to display and navigate through those rules. Display is based on On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), presenting a set of rules as a cube, where dimensions correspond to the premises of rules. Cubes reflect the hierarchy that exists between FDs, CFDs and ARs. Navigation is based on a lattice, where nodes are OLAP views, and edges are OLAP navigation links, and guides users from cube to cube. We present an illustrative example with the help of our prototype.

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