Support envelopes: a technique for exploring the structure of association patterns

This paper introduces support envelopes--a new tool for analyzing association patterns--and illustrates some of their properties, applications, and possible extensions. Specifically, the support envelope for a transaction data set and a specified pair of positive integers (m, n) consists of the items and transactions that need to be searched to find any association pattern involving m or more transactions and n or more items. For any transaction data set with M transactions and N items, there is a unique lattice of at most M N support envelopes that captures the structure of the association patterns in that data set. Because support envelopes are not encumbered by a support threshold, this support lattice provides a complete view of the association structure of the data set, including association patterns that have low support. Furthermore, the boundary of the support lattice--the support boundary--has at most min(M, N) envelopes and is especially interesting since it bounds the maxi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Michael Steinbach, Pang-Ning Tan, Vipin Kumar
• Keywords: Data Mining, KDD 2004, Support Envelopes, Support Lattice--the Support, Transaction Data Set