Efficient Discovery of Functional and Approximate Dependencies Using Partitions

Discovery of functionaldependencies from relations has been identified as an important database analysis technique. In this paper, we present a new approach for finding functional dependencies from large databases, based on partitioningthe set of rows with respect to their attribute values. The use of partitions makes the discovery of approximate functional dependencies easy and efficient, and the erroneous or exceptional rows can be identified easily. Experiments show that the new algorithm is efficient in practice. For benchmark databases the running times are improved by several orders of magnitude over previously published results. The algorithmis also applicableto much larger datasets than the previous methods. 1 Functional and approximate dependencies Functional dependencies are relationships between attributes of a relation: a functional dependency states that the value of an attribute is uniquely determined by the values of some other attributes. The discovery of functional de...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Ykä Huhtala, Juha Kärkkäinen, Pasi Porkka, Hannu Toivonen
• Keywords: Approximate Functional Dependencies, Database, Dependencies Functional Dependencies, Functional Dependency, ICDE 1998