An interestingness measure for knowledge bases

Abstract

Association rule mining and logical rule mining both aim to discover interesting relationships in data or knowledge. In association rule mining, relationships are identified based on the occurrence of items in a dataset, while in logical rule mining, relationships are determined based on logical relationships between atoms in a knowledge base. Association rule mining has been widely studied in transactional databases, mainly for market basket analysis. Confidence has become the most widely used interesting measure to assess the strength of a rule. Many other interestingness measures have been proposed since confidence can be insufficient to filter negatively associated relationships. Recently, logical rule mining has become an important area of research, as new facts can be inferred by applying discovered logical rules. They can be used for reasoning, identifying potential errors in knowledge bases, and to better understand data. However, there are currently only a few measures for logical rule mining. Furthermore, current measures do not consider relations that can have several objects, called quasi-functions, which can dramatically alter the interestingness of the rule. In this paper, we focus on effectively assessing the strength of logical rules. We propose a new interestingness measure that takes into account two categories of relations, functions and quasi-functions, to assess the degree of certainty of logical rules. We compare our proposed measure with a widely used measure on both synthetic test data and real knowledge bases. We show that it is more effective in indicating rule quality, making it an appropriate interestingness measure for logical rule evaluation.