ARMADA - An algorithm for discovering richer relative temporal association rules from interval-based data

Temporal association rule mining promises the ability to discover time-dependent correlations or patterns between events in large volumes of data. To date, most temporal data mining research has focused on events existing at a point in time rather than over a temporal interval. In comparison to static rules, mining with respect to time points provides semantically richer rules. However, accommodating temporal intervals offers rules that are richer still. In this paper we outline a new algorithm, ARMADA, to discover frequent temporal patterns and to generate richer interval-based temporal association rules. In addition, we introduce a maximum gap time constraint that can be used to get rid of insignificant patterns and rules so that the number of generated patterns and rules can be reduced. Synthetic datasets are utilized to assess the performance of the algorithm. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.