Knowledge Discovery in Databases: An Attribute-Oriented Approach

Knowledge discovery in databases, or data mining, is an important issue in the development of dataand knowledge-base systems. An attribute-oriented induction method has been developed for knowledge discovery in databases. The method integrates a machine learning paradigm, especially learning-from-examples techniques, with set-oriented database operations and extracts generalized data from actual data in databases. An attribute-oriented concept tree ascension technique is applied in generalization, which substantially reduces the computational complexity of database learning processes. Different kinds of knowledge rules, including characteristic rules, discrimination rules, quantitative rules, and data evolution regularities can be discovered efficiently using the attribute-oriented approach. In addition to learning in relational databases, the approach can be applied to knowledge discovery in nested relational and deductive databases. Learning can also be performed with databases containing noisy data and exceptional cases using database statistics. Furthermore, the rules discovered can be used to query database knowledge, answer cooperative queries and facilitate semantic query optimization. Based upon these principles, a prototyped database learning system, DBLEARN, has been constructed for experimentation.