Onto4AR: a framework for mining association rules

Despite the efforts made on last decades to center the process of knowledge discovery on the user, the balance between the discovery of unknown and interesting patterns is far from being reached. The discovery of association rules is a paradigmatic case, where this balance is quite difficult to establish. In this paper, we propose a new framework for pattern mining – the Onto4AR. This framework is centered on the use of ontologies, for the representation and introduction of domain knowledge into the mining process. By defining constraints based on an ontology, the framework provides a mining environment independent of the problem domain. With this simplification on the definition and use of constraints, the framework contributes to reduce the gap between discovered rules and user expectations.