LEARNING IN RELATIONAL DATABASES - A ROUGH SET APPROACH

Knowledge discovery in databases, or data mining, is an important direction in the development of data and knowledge-based systems. Because of the huge amount of data stored in large numbers of existing databases, and because the amount of data generated in electronic forms is growing rapidly, it is necessary to develop efficient methods to extract knowledge from databases. An attribute-oriented rough set approach has been developed for knowledge discovery in databases. The method integrates machine-learning paradigm, especially learning-from-examples techniques, with rough set techniques. An attribute-oriented concept tree ascension technique is first applied in generalization, which substantially reduces the computational complexity of database learning processes. Then the cause-effect relationship among the attributes in the database is analyzed using rough set techniques, and the unimportant or irrelevant attributes are eliminated. Thus concise and strong rules with little or no redundant information can be learned efficiently. Our study shows that attribute-oriented induction combined with rough set theory provide an efficient and effective mechanism for knowledge discovery in database systems.