A LAYERED OPTIMIZER FOR MINING ASSOCIATION RULES OVER RELATIONAL DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS By MAHESH DUDGIKAR A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE

2000 To my family iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Sharma Chakravarthy for giving me an opportunity to work on this interesting topic and for providing me with excellent advice, great guidance and support throughout the course of this research work. His tireless patience and knowledge have been invaluable. Without his guidance, this thesis would not have been possible. Next, I would like to thank my family back home for their unwavering moral, endless love and financial support. agreeing to serve on my committee and for taking out time from their busy schedules to read and comment on my thesis. Many thanks go to Sharon Grant for a well administered research environment and for her help with everything. Her attention to every minute detail is really appreciated. I would like to thank Shiby Thomas for his knowledge that he shared with me, and the long discussions we had at the start of this research. Special thanks go to Hongen Zhang for the endless discussions and tireless work throughout the phases of design and implementation of this entire work. Thanks also go to my friends Kiran, Sridhar, Sujith and Yadu, who made me feel at home and for being with me all the way. iv Sincere thanks go to Ashwin for the long discussions and debates we had over technical matters that made both of us understand things better. Thanks go to all my friends at the database center for the chat sessions, lunch sessions, and so on. Lastly, I thank the CISE department and Matthew Belcher for providing me with all the computing facilities I needed. I gratefully acknowledge all the support.