An efficient algorithm for incremental mining of temporal association rules

Article history: Received 14 September 2008 Received in revised form 5 March 2010 Accepted 8 March 2010 Available online 15 March 2010 This paper presents the concept of temporal association rules in order to solve the problem of handling time series by including time expressions into association rules. Actually, temporal databases are continually appended or updated so that the discovered rules need to be updated. Re-running the temporal mining algorithm every time is ineffective since it neglects the previously discovered rules, and repeats the work done previously. Furthermore, existing incremental mining techniques cannot deal with temporal association rules. In this paper, an incremental algorithm to maintain the temporal association rules in a transaction database is proposed. The algorithm benefits from the results of earlier mining to derive the final mining output. The experimental results on both the synthetic and the real dataset illustrate a significant improvement over the conventional approach of mining the entire updated database. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.