DynGRAR: A dynamic approach to mining gradual relational association rules

Relational Association Rules (RARs) capture generic relations between attributes values in possibly large data sets. Due to their ability to uncover underlying semantically relevant patterns, they are of particular interest in data mining research and applicable in both unsupervised and supervised learning scenarios. With the aim of increasing the stability and expressiveness of the classical, non-gradual RARs, Gradual Relational Association Rules (GRARs) have been introduced. By generalizing the boolean relations to gradual relations, GRARs also capture the degrees to which generic relations are satisfied. In the current paper we introduce a new approach called DynGRAR (Dynamic Gradual Relational Association Rules Miner) for uncovering interesting GRARs in dynamic data sets which are incrementally extended with both new data instances and new data attributes. DynGRAR dynamically adjusts the set of all interesting GRARs. Through multiple experiments performed on publicly available software defect prediction data sets, we have evaluated DynGRAR versus applying the standard GRARs mining algorithm from scratch on the extended data. The results obtained emphasize the superior performance of the dynamic approach we propose.