We introduce the problem of mining association rules in large relational tables containing both quantitative and categorical attributes. An example of such an association might be "10% of married people between age 50 and 60 have at least 2 cars". We deal with quantitative attributes by fine-partitioning the values of the attribute and then combining adjacent partitions as necessary. We introduce measures of partial completeness which quantify the information lost due to partitioning. A direct application of this technique can generate too many similar rules. We tackle this problem by using a "greater-than-expected-value" interest measure to identify the interesting rules in the output. We give an algorithm for mining such quantitative association rules. Finally, we describe the results of using this approach on a real-life dataset.
展开▼
