In this paper, the rare event detection issue in video event detection is addressed through the proposed data mining framework which can be generalized to be domain independent. The fully automatic process via the combination of distancebased and rule-based data mining techniques can greatly reduce the number of negative (non-event) instances and the feature dimension to facilitate the final event detection, without pruning away any positive (event) testing instance along the process. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework are demonstrated over the goal event detection application based on a large collection of soccer videos with different styles.