A New and Versatile Method for Association Generation

Current algorithms for finding associations among the attributes describing data in a database have a number of shortcomings: 1. Applications that require associations with very small support have prohibitively large running times. 2. They assume a static database. Some applications require generating associations in real-time from a dynamic database, where transactions are constantly being added and deleted. There are no existing algorithms to accomodate such applications. 3. They can only find associations of the type where a conjunction of attributes implies a conjunction of different attributes. It turns out that there are many cases where a conjunction of attributes implies another conjunction only provided the exclusion of certain attributes. To our knowledge, there is no current algorithm that can generate such excluding associations.