OLEMAR: An Online Environment for Mining Association Rules in Multidimensional Data

Data warehouses and OLAP (online analytical processing) provide tools to explore and navigate through data cubes in order to extract interesting information under different perspectives and levels of granularity. Nevertheless, OLAP techniques do not allow the identification of relationships, groupings, or exceptions that could hold in a data cube. To that end, we propose to enrich OLAP techniques with data mining facilities to benefit from the capabilities they offer. In this chapter, we propose an online environment for mining association rules in data cubes. Our environment called OLEMAR (online environment for mining association rules), is designed to extract associations from multidimensional data. It allows the extraction of inter-dimensional association rules from data cubes according to a sum-based aggregate measure, a more general indicator than aggregate values provided by the traditional COUNT measure. In our approach, OLAP users are able to drive a mining process guided by a meta-rule, which meets their analysis objectives. In addition, the environment is based on a formalization, which exploits aggregate measures to revisit the definition of the support and the confidence of discovered rules. This formalization also helps evaluate the interestingness of association rules according to two additional quality measures: lift and loevinger. Furthermore, in order to focus on the discovered associations and validate them, we provide a visual representation based on the graphic semiology principles. Such a representation consists in a graphic encoding of frequent patterns and association rules in the same multidimensional space as the one associated with the mined data cube. We have developed our approach as a component in a general online analysis platform called Miningcubes according to an Apriori-like algorithm, which helps extract inter-dimensional association rules directly from materialized multidimensional structures of data. In order to illustrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our proposal, we analyze a real-life case study about breast cancer data and conduct performance experimentation of the mining process.