8750369
Query flocks: a generalization of association-rule mining
Association-rule mining has proved a highly successful technique for extracting useful information from very large databases. This success is attributed not only to the appropriateness of the objectives, but to the fact that a number of new query-optimization ideas, such as the “a-priori” trick, make association-rule mining run much faster than might be expected. In this paper we see that the same tricks can be extended to a much more general context, allowing efficient mining of very large databases for many different kinds of patterns. The general idea, called “query flocks,” is a generate-and-test model for data-mining problems. We show how the idea can be used either in a general-purpose mining system or in a next generation of conventional query optimizers.
9277235
Index selection for OLAP
On-line analytical processing (OLAP) is a recent and important application of database systems. Typically, OLAP data is presented as a multidimensional "data cube." OLAP queries are complex and can take many hours or even days to run, if executed directly on the raw data. The most common method of reducing execution time is to precompute some of the queries into summary tables (subcubes of the data cube) and then to build indexes on these summary tables. In most commercial OLAP systems today, the summary tables that are to be precomputed are picked first, followed by the selection of the appropriate indexes on them. A trial-and-error approach is used to divide the space available between the summary tables and the indexes. This two-step process can perform very poorly. Since both summary tables and indexes consume the same resource-space-their selection should be done together for the most efficient use of space. The authors give algorithms that automate the selection of summary tables and indexes. In particular, they present a family of algorithms of increasing time complexities, and prove strong performance bounds for them. The algorithms with higher complexities have better performance bounds. However, the increase in the performance bound is diminishing, and they show that an algorithm of moderate complexity can perform fairly close to the optimal.
6212306
Constraint checking with partial information
Constraints are a valuable tool for managing information across multiple databases, as well as for general purposes of assuring data integrity. However, efficient implementation of constraint checking is difficult. In this paper we explore techniques for assuring constraint satisfaction without performing a complete evaluation of the constraints. We consider methods that use only constraint definitions, methods that use constraints and updates, and methods that use constraints, updates, and “local” data.
15385590
Dynamic itemset counting and implication rules for market basket data
We consider the problem of analyzing market-basket data and present several important contributions. First, we present a new algorithm for finding large itemsets which uses fewer passes over the data than classic algorithms, and yet uses fewer candidate itemsets than methods based on sampling. We investigate the idea of item reordering, which can improve the low-level efficiency of the algorithm. Second, we present a new way of generating “implication rules,” which are normalized based on both the antecedent and the consequent and are truly implications (not simply a measure of co-occurrence), and we show how they produce more intuitive results than other methods. Finally, we show how different characteristics of real data, as opposed by synthetic data, can dramatically affect the performance of the system and the form of the results.
208920048
Integrating Information by Outerjoins and Full Disjunctions.
Our motivation is the piecing together of tidbits of information found on the "web" into a usable information structure. The problem is related to that of computing the natural outerjoin of many relations in a way that preserves all possible connections among facts. Such a computation has been termed a "full disjunction" by Galindo-Legaria. We are thus led to ask the question of when a full disjunction can be computed by some sequence of natural outerjoins. The answer involves a concept of from Fagin [1983] called fl-acyclic hypergraphs." We prove that there is a natural outerjoin sequence producing the full disjunction if and only if the set of relation schemes forms a connected, fl-acyclic hypergraph.
5323612
A Query Translation Scheme for Rapid Implementation of Wrappers
Wrappers provide access to heterogeneous information sources by converting application queries into source specific queries or commands. In this paper we present a wrapper implementation toolkit that facilitates rapid development of wrappers. We focus on the query translation component of the toolkit, called the converter. The converter takes as input a Query Description and Translation Language (QDTL) description of the queries that can be processed by the underlying source. Based on this the converter decides if an application query is (a) directly supported, i.e., it can be translated to a query of the underlying system following instructions in the QDTL description; (b) logically supported, i.e., logically equivalent to a directly supported query; (c) indirectly supported, i.e., it can be computed by applying a filter, automatically generated by the converter, to the result of a directly supported query.
14178054
The Transitive Reduction of a Directed Graph
We consider economical representations for the path information in a directed graph. A directed graph $G^t $ is said to be a transitive reduction of the directed graph G provided that (i) $G^t $ has a directed path from vertex u to vertex v if and only if G has a directed path from vertex u to vertex v, and (ii) there is no graph with fewer arcs than $G^t $ satisfying condition (i). Though directed graphs with cycles may have more than one such representation, we select a natural canonical representative as the transitive reduction for such graphs. It is shown that the time complexity of the best algorithm for finding the transitive reduction of a graph is the same as the time to compute the transitive closure of a graph or to perform Boolean matrix multiplication.
17355782
On complementary and independent mappings on databases
We define the notion of independent views to indicate whether the range values of the two views may be achieved independently The concept of complementary views indicates when the domain element can be uniquely determined by the range values of the two complementary views We consider the relationship between independent and complementary views In unrestricted domains, a view (but not the identity or empty view) can have more than one complementary, independent view Databases, however, are more restricted domains They are finite power sets A view is monotonic if it preserves inclusion However, in finite power sets when all views are monotonic, if a given view has another view which is independent and complementary, then this view is unique.
209399085
Answering Queries Using Limited External Processors.