Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

7.3 Constraint-Based Frequent Pattern Mining

A data mining process may uncover thousands of rules from a given data set, most of which end up being unrelated or uninteresting to users. Often, users have a good sense of which “direction” of mining may lead to interesting patterns and the “form” of the patterns or rules they want to find. They may also have a sense of “conditions” for the rules, which would eliminate the discovery of certain rules that they know would not be of interest. Thus, a good heuristic is to have the users specify such intuition or expectations as constraints to confine the search space. This strategy is known as constraint-based mining. The constraints can include the following:

■ Knowledge type constraints: These specify ...