A new incremental updating algorithm for association rules

Incremental data mining is an attractive goal for many kinds of mining in large databases or data warehouses. A new incremental updating algorithm rule growing algorithm (RGA) is presented for efficient maintenance discovered association rules when new transaction data is added to a transaction database. The algorithm RGA makes use of previous association rules as seed rules. By RGA, the seed rules whether are strong or not can be confirmed without scanning all the transaction DB in most cases. If the distributing of item of transaction DB is not uniform, the inflexion of robustness curve comes very quickly, and RGA gets great efficiency, saving lots of time for I/O. Experiments validate the algorithm and the test results showed that this algorithm is efficient.