An efficient and effective association-rule maintenance algorithm for record modification

Modification of records in databases is common in real-world applications. Developing an efficient and effective mining algorithm to maintain discovered information as the records in a database are updated is thus quite important in the field of data mining. Although association rules for modification of records can be maintained by using deletion and insertion procedures, this requires twice the computation time needed for a single procedure. In this paper, we present a new modification algorithm to resolve this issue. The concept of pre-large itemsets is used to reduce the need for rescanning original databases and to save maintenance costs. The proposed algorithm does not require rescanning of original databases until a specified number of records have been modified. If the database is large, then the number of modified records allowed will also be large. This characteristic is especially useful for real-world applications. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.