Mining Multi-Relational Gradual Patterns

Gradual patterns highlight covariations of attributes of the form “The more/less X, the more/less Y”. Their usefulness in several applications has recently stimulated the synthesis of several algorithms for their automated discovery from large datasets. However, existing techniques require all the interesting data to be in a single database relation or table. This paper extends the notion of gradual pattern to the case in which the co-variations are possibly expressed between attributes of different database relations. The interestingness measure for this class of “relational gradual patterns” is defined on the basis of both Kendall’s τ and gradual supports. Moreover, this paper proposes two algorithms, named τRGP Miner and gRGP Miner, for the discovery of relational gradual rules. Three pruning strategies to reduce the search space are proposed. The efficiency of the algorithms is empirically validated, and the usefulness of relational gradual patterns is proved on some real-world databases.