Indiana University Bloomington

Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Technical Report TR685:
Ordering Depth First Search to Improve AFD Mining

Jeremy T. Engle, Edward L. Robertson, and Dimitar G. Nikolov
(Jun 2010), Pages: 12 pages
[This is an expanded version of a paper under review Abstract]
Abstract:
This paper describes a new search algorithm, bottom-up attribute keyness depth- rst search (BU-AKD), for mining powerset lattices with the use of a monotonic approximation measure; characteristics present in many problem domains. The research reported here focuses on one of these problem domains, the discovery of Approximate Functional Dependencies (AFDs). AFDs are measured versions of functional dependencies, which have received attention from the relational database and machine learning communities. Bottomup depth- rst search, BU-DFS, algorithms in general can improve e ciency over the traditional bottom-up breadth rst search algorithm by doing a better job of avoiding the calculation of the approximation measure based on information learned as the search space is explored. The goal of BU-AKD is to resolve one important drawback of BU-DFS algorithms which makes their use in practice problematic - their inconsistent runtime performance as search parameters vary. The approach that BU-AKD takes is to use a heuristic to guide the exploration of a lattice which adapts to the search parameters, thus, providing consistent performance comparable to best-performing BU-DFS algorithms. This paper reports a variety of experiments which evaluate BUAKD and other algorithms using an algorithmic, machineindependent cost measure, as well as traditional runtime tests. Experimental results show that BU-AKD performs consistently well and validates a number of insights used in its design.

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