Abstract: The problem of discovering association rules in large databases has received considerable research attention. Much research has examined the exhaustive discovery of all association rules involving positive binary literals (e.g. Agrawal et al. 1996). Other research has concerned finding complex association rules for high-arity attributes such as CN2 (Clark and Niblett 1989). Complex association rules are capable of representing concepts such as "PurchasedChips=True and PurchasedSoda=False and Area=NorthEast and CustomerType=Occasional AgeRange=Young", but their generality comes with severe computational penalties (intractable numbers of preconditions can have large support). Here, we introduce new algorithms by which a sparse data structure called the ADtree, introduced in (Moore and Lee 1997), can accelerate the finding of complex association rules from large datasets. The ADtree uses the algebra of probability tables to cache a dataset's sufficient statistics...
Brigham S. Anderson, Andrew W. Moore