Mining conditional patterns in a database

Abstract

Though frequent itemsets and association rules express interesting association among items of frequently occurring itemsets in a database, there may exist other types of interesting associations among the items. A critical analysis of frequent itemsets would provide more insight about a database. In this paper, we introduce the notion of conditional pattern in a database. Conditional patterns are interesting and useful for solving many problems. We propose an algorithm for mining conditional patterns in a database. Experiments are conducted on three real datasets. The results of the experiments show that conditional patterns store significant nuggets of knowledge about a database.