Mining adaptive ratio rules from distributed data sources

Different from traditional association-rule mining, a new paradigm called Ratio Rule (RR) was proposed recently. Ratio rules are aimed at capturing the quantitative association knowledge, We extend this framework to mining ratio rules from distributed and dynamic data sources. This is a novel and challenging problem. The traditional techniques used for ratio rule mining is an eigen-system analysis which can often fall victim to noise. This has limited the application of ratio rule mining greatly. The distributed data sources impose additional constraints for the mining procedure to be robust in the presence of noise, because it is difficult to clean all the data sources in real time in real-world tasks. In addition, the traditional batch methods for ratio rule mining cannot cope with dynamic data. In this paper, we propose an integrated method to mining ratio rules from distributed and changing data sources, by first mining the ratio rules from each data source separately through a novel robust and adaptive one-pass algorithm (which is called Robust and Adaptive Ratio Rule (RARR)), and then integrating the rules of each data source in a simple probabilistic model. In this way, we can acquire the global rules from all the local information sources adaptively. We show that the RARR technique can converge to a fixed point and is robust as well. Moreover, the integration of rules is efficient and effective. Both theoretical analysis and experiments illustrate that the performance of RARR and the proposed information integration procedure is satisfactory for the purpose of discovering latent associations in distributed dynamic data source.