When mining a large database, the number of patterns discovered can easily exceed the capabilities of a human user to identify interesting results. To address this problem, various techniques have been suggested to reduce and/or order the patterns prior to presenting them to the user. In this paper, our focus is on ranking summaries generated from a single dataset, where attributes can be generalized in many different ways and to many levels of granularity according to taxonomic hierarchies. We theoretically and empirically evaluate twelve diversity measures used as heuristic measures of interestingness for ranking summaries generated from databases. The twelve diversity measures have previously been utilized in various disciplines, such as information theory, statistics, ecology, and economics. We describe five principles that any measure must satisfy to be considered useful for ranking summaries. Theoretical results show that the proposed principles define a partial order on the ...
Robert J. Hilderman, Howard J. Hamilton