Method for mining association rules in data

Abstract

An electronic data mining process for mining from an electronic data base using an electronic digital computer a listing of commercially useful information of the type known in the art as an association rule containing at least one uninstantiated condition. For example, the commercially useful information may be information useful for sales promotion, such as promotion of telephone usage. The computer retrieves from the database a plurality of stored parameters from which measures of the uninstatiated condition can be determined. The computer uses a dynamic programming algorithm and iterates over intervals or sub-ranges of the parameters to obtain what is called an at least partially optimized association rule, as optimized intervals or sub-ranges of at least some of the retrieved parameters, for example, time intervals of high usage of certain types of telephone connections. These optimized intervals are provided as the listed commercially useful information. The amount of needed iteration is reduced in some cases by using so-called bucketing and divide-and-conquer techniques. Extension of the process for a plurality of uninstantiated conditions is described.