A tool for extracting XML association rules

Abstract

The recent success of XML as a standard to represent semi-structured data, and the increasing amount of available XML data, pose new challenges to the data mining community. In this paper we present the X MINE operator a tool we developed to extract XML association rules for XML documents. The operator; that is based on XPath and inspired by the syntax ofXQuery, allows us to express complex mining tasks, compactly and intuitively. X MINE can be used to specify indifferently ( and simultaneously) mining tasks both on the content and on the structure of the data, since the distinction in XML is slight. changed among data mining tools (e.g., PMML [8]); but there are no significant extensions of data mining research taking full advantage of the intrinsic properties of XML. However, it is easy to foresee that the spreading of XML will cause an increasing interest on this subject, going beyond a mere syntactic adaptation to XML of data mining artifacts and techniques.In this paper, we present the X MINE operator, a tool that can be used to extract association rules from native XML documents, shortly "XML association rules", which we first introduced in [6, 5]. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we overview association rules in the context of relational databases. In Section 3 we shortly discuss the notion of association rules for XML while we refer the readers to [6,5] for additional details about the their theoretical foundations. In Section 4 we present the X MINE operator through a serie of intuitive examples. In Section 5 we introduce some basic concepts needed to discuss implementation details. In Section 6 we discuss how XML association rules are extracted from an XML document through XMINE by composing an execution environment for XPath expressions and an algorithm for discovering frequent itemsets. In Section 7 we give some implementation details discussing the current state of the prototype we developed and an outline of the planned future development. We conclude the paper with a discussion of future research directions.

Efficient incremental breadth-depth XML event mining

“…The first type of approaches applies relational data mining tools on XML data by mapping XML documents to relational data model and storing them in a relational database [11]. The second type of approaches applies data mining techniques directly onto native-XML data [2,9,10]. We are interested with the second type of approaches, specifically mining frequent itemsets and association rules from XML data.…”

“…Authors actually transform complex documents into a format that can be mined by Wan algorithm using XSLT. Braga et al propose XMINE [2], a tool to extract XML association rules from XML documents. The XMINE operator is based on XPath and XQuery to express complex mining tasks on the content and the structure of XML data.…”

XML Integrated Environment for Service-Oriented Data Management

“…Another usage is when annotating an XML document to add calculated values based on existing values. Some cases, for instance when parent elements have to be updated 51 based on the updates previously done to child elements, cannot be handled in XSLT 1.0 without using XSLT extensions or pipelining multiple stylesheets.…”

A Framework for Data Structure-Guided Extraction of XML Association Rules

“…Because their approach is not for the context of native XML documents and it considers just strict parent-child relations. Recently, tools for extracting association rules from XML documents have been proposed in [4,10], but both of them are approaching from the view point of a XML query language. This causes the problem of language-dependent association rules mining.…”