A concurrent rule scheduling algorithm for active rules

The use of rules in a distributed environment creates new challenges for the development of active rule execution models. In particular, since a single event can trigger multiple rules that execute over distributed sources of data, it is important to make use of concurrent rule execution whenever possible. This paper presents the details of the integration rule scheduling (IRS) algorithm. Integration rules are active database rules that are used for component integration in a distributed environment. The IRS algorithm identifies rule conflicts for multiple rules triggered by the same event through static, compile-time analysis of the read and write sets of each rule. A unique aspect of the algorithm is that the conflict analysis includes the effects of nested rule execution that occurs as a result of using an execution model with an immediate coupling mode. The algorithm therefore identifies conflicts that may occur as a result of the concurrent execution of different rule triggering sequences. The rules are then formed into a priority graph before execution, defining the order in which rules triggered by the same event should be processed. Rules with the same priority can be executed concurrently. The IRS algorithm guarantees confluence in the final state of the rule execution. The IRS algorithm is applicable for rule scheduling in both distributed and centralized rule execution environments.     

Generalized production rules as a basis for integrating active anddeductive databases

The authors address the problem of providing a homogeneous framework for integrating, in a database environment, active rules, which allow the specification of actions to be executed whenever certain events take place, and deductive rules, which allow the specification of deductions in a logic programming style. Actually, it is widely recognized that both kinds of rules enhance the capabilities of database systems since they provide very natural mechanisms for the management of various important activities (e.g., knowledge representation, complex data manipulation, integrity constraint enforcement, view maintenance). However, in spite of their strong relationship, little work has been done on the unification of these powerful paradigms. They present a rule-based language with an event-driven semantics that allows programmers to express both active and deductive computations. The language is based on a new notion of production rules whose effect is both a change of state and an answer to a query. By using several examples, they show that this simple language schema allows one to uniformly define different computations on data, including complex data manipulations, deductive evaluations, and active rule processing. They define the semantics of the language and then describe the architecture of a preliminary implementation of the language. Finally, they report on the application and experience of using the language     

Maintaining data-driven rules in databases

A new model with invariant-based language effectively handles data-driven rules in databases and uses the rules' inherent semantic properties and supporting mechanisms to meet high-level language requirements. It is an extension of the basic PARDES model developed by Opher Etzion in 1990 to support derivations and integrity constraints in databases. The model's invariant-based language, unlike other programming languages, can follow data-driven rules' semantic properties. Such rules are activated by modifications of data items in a database, and they play an important role in many applications that maintain complex relationships between data items or interdependencies between parts of the database. Applications include expert systems, real-time databases, simulations, and decision-support systems. The authors present requirements for choosing an adequate programming style that uses data-driven rules. These requirements are based on software-engineering criteria such as compatibility with a high-level language and verifiability of the rule language. The authors show that contemporary database programming styles fail to meet these requirements, and they present the invariant-based language as a viable solution     

Effective timestamping in databases

Many existing database applications place various timestamps on their data, rendering temporal values such as dates and times prevalent in database tables. During the past two decades, several dozen temporal data models have appeared, all with timestamps being integral components. The models have used timestamps for encoding two specific temporal aspects of database facts, namely transaction time, when the facts are current in the database, and valid time, when the facts are true in the modeled reality. However, with few exceptions, the assignment of timestamp values has been considered only in the context of individual modification statements. This paper takes the next logical step: It considers the use of timestamping for capturing transaction and valid time in the context of transactions. The paper initially identifies and analyzes several problems with straightforward timestamping, then proceeds to propose a variety of techniques aimed at solving these problems. Timestamping the results of a transaction with the commit time of the transaction is a promising approach. The paper studies how this timestamping may be done using a spectrum of techniques. While many database facts are valid until now, the current time, this value is absent from the existing temporal types. Techniques that address this problem using different substitute values are presented. Using a stratum architecture, the performance of the different proposed techniques are studied. Although querying and modifying time-varying data is accompanied by a number of subtle problems, we present a comprehensive approach that provides application programmers with simple, consistent, and efficient support for modifying bitemporal databases in the context of user transactions. Received: March 11, 1998 / Accepted July 27, 1999     

数据库中的模糊逻辑规则发现

关联规则是数据库中的知识发现（KDD）领域的重要研究课题。模糊关联规则可以用自然语言来表达人类知识,近年来受到KDD研究人员的普遍关注。但是,目前大多数模糊关联规则发现方法仍然沿用经典关联规则发现中常用的支持度和置信度测度。事实上,模糊关联规则可以有不同的解释,而且不同的解释对规则发现方法有很大影响。从逻辑的观点出发,定义了模糊逻辑规则、支持度、蕴含度及其相关概念,提出了模糊逻辑规则发现算法,该算法结合了模糊逻辑概念和Apriori算法,从给定的定量数据库中发现模糊逻辑规则。     

Discovering causal rules in relational databases

This article explores the combined application of inductive learning algorithms and causal inference techniques to the problem of discovering causal rules among the attributes of a relational database. Given some relational data each field can be considered as a random variable and a hybrid graph can be built by detecting conditional independencies among variables. The induced graph represents genuine and potential causal relations as well as spurious associations. When the variables are discrete or have been discretized to test condi tional independencies supervised induction algorithms can be used to learn causal rules that is conditional statements in which causes appear as antecedents and effects as consequences. The approach is illustrated by means of some experiments conducted on different data sets.     

数据库中动态关联规则的挖掘

关联规则能挖掘变量间的相互依赖关系,但是不能反映规则本身的变化规律．为此本文提出了动态关联规则．首先将整个待挖掘数据集按时间划分成若干子集,每个子集挖掘得到的每条规则分别生成一个支持度和一个置信度,这样每条规则在全集上就对应了一个支持度向量和一个置信度向量．通过分析支持度向量和置信度向量,不仅可以发现规则随时间变化的情况,也能够预测规则的发展趋势．本文还提出了两个挖掘动态关联规则的算法,且对他们做了比较．并给出了柱状图和时间序列两种方法分析这两个向量．最后给出了一个挖掘动态关联规则的应用实例。     

Mining multiple-level association rules in large databases

A top-down progressive deepening method is developed for efficient mining of multiple-level association rules from large transaction databases based on the a priori principle. A group of variant algorithms is proposed based on the ways of sharing intermediate results, with the relative performance tested and analyzed. The enforcement of different interestingness measurements to find more interesting rules, and the relaxation of rule conditions for finding “level-crossing” association rules, are also investigated. The study shows that efficient algorithms can be developed from large databases for the discovery of interesting and strong multiple-level association rules     

Mining spatial association rules in image databases

In this paper, we propose a novel spatial mining algorithm, called 9DLT-Miner, to mine the spatial association rules from an image database, where every image is represented by the 9DLT representation. The proposed method consists of two phases. First, we find all frequent patterns of length one. Next, we use frequent k-patterns (k ? 1) to generate all candidate (k + 1)-patterns. For each candidate pattern generated, we scan the database to count the pattern’s support and check if it is frequent. The steps in the second phase are repeated until no more frequent patterns can be found. Since our proposed algorithm prunes most of impossible candidates, it is more efficient than the Apriori algorithm. The experiment results show that 9DLT-Miner runs 2-5 times faster than the Apriori algorithm.     

Mining interesting association rules from customer databases and transaction databases

In this paper, we examine a new data mining issue of mining association rules from customer databases and transaction databases. The problem is decomposed into two subproblems: identifying all the large itemsets from the transaction database and mining association rules from the customer database and the large itemsets identified. For the first subproblem, we propose an efficient algorithm to discover all the large itemsets from the transaction database. Experimental results show that by our approach, the total execution time can be reduced significantly. For the second subproblem, a relationship graph is constructed according to the identified large itemsets from the transaction database and the priorities of condition attributes from the customer database. Based on the relationship graph, we present an efficient graph-based algorithm to discover interesting association rules embedded in the transaction database and the customer database.     

Efficient mining of association rules in distributed databases

Many sequential algorithms have been proposed for the mining of association rules. However, very little work has been done in mining association rules in distributed databases. A direct application of sequential algorithms to distributed databases is not effective, because it requires a large amount of communication overhead. In this study, an efficient algorithm called DMA (Distributed Mining of Association rules), is proposed. It generates a small number of candidate sets and requires only O(n) messages for support-count exchange for each candidate set, where n is the number of sites in a distributed database. The algorithm has been implemented on an experimental testbed, and its performance is studied. The results show that DMA has superior performance, when compared with the direct application of a popular sequential algorithm, in distributed databases     

Temporal triggers in active databases

In this paper we propose two languages, called Future Temporal Logic (FTL) and Past Temporal Logic (PTL), for specifying temporal triggers. Some examples of trigger conditions that can be specified in our language are the following: “The value of a certain attribute increases by more than 10% in 10 minutes,” “A tuple that satisfies a certain predicate is added to the database at least 10 minutes before another tuple, satisfying a different condition, is added to the database.” Such triggers are important for monitor and control applications. In addition to the languages, we present algorithms for processing the trigger conditions specified in these languages, namely, procedures for determining when the trigger conditions are satisfied. These methods can be added as a “temporal” component to an existing database management systems. A preliminary prototype of the temporal component that uses the FTL language has been built on top of Sybase running on SUN workstations     

Query execution scheduling in parallel object-oriented databases

Complex object-oriented queries generally consist of path expressions and explicit join operations. Since explicit join operations have been acknowledged as the most expensive operations, query executions normally start from the path expressions. Each path expression may form a sub-query. There are two existing strategies to sub-queries processing: ‘serial’ and ‘parallel’ execution scheduling strategies. Serial sub-queries execution corresponds to an execution of the sub-queries one-by-one, whereas parallel sub-queries execution corresponds to simultaneous execution of the sub-queries. When a sub-query is being processed, parallelization techniques may be applied. In this paper, we focus on the scheduling issues of the sub-queries, rather than the parallelization of the sub-queries themselves. Rules are formulated to guide the parallel query execution process. Our analysis shows that when there is no load skew, the serial scheduling strategy is preferred, otherwise the parallel scheduling strategy should be used.     

Data-driven discovery of quantitative rules in relational databases

A quantitative rule is a rule associated with quantitative information which assesses the representativeness of the rule in the database. An efficient induction method is developed for learning quantitative rules in relational databases. With the assistance of knowledge about concept hierarchies, data relevance, and expected rule forms, attribute-oriented induction can be performed on the database, which integrates database operations with the learning process and provides a simple, efficient way of learning quantitative rules from large databases. The method involves the learning of both characteristic rules and classification rules. Quantitative information facilitates quantitative reasoning, incremental learning, and learning in the presence of noise. Moreover, learning qualitative rules can be treated as a special case of learning quantitative rules. It is shown that attribute-oriented induction provides an efficient and effective mechanism for learning various kinds of knowledge rules from relational databases     

不完全数据库中关联规则的两种求估方法

在关系数据库中,数据丢失现象常常是不可避免的。在不完全数据库中挖掘关联规则的关键问题是如何估算关联规则的支持度和置信度。给出了不完全数据库中关联规则挖掘的两种求估方法,并进行了简单的比较。     

Priority assignment in real-time active databases

Active databases and real-time databases have been important areas of research in the recent past. It has been recognized that many benefits can be gained by integrating real-time and active database technologies. However, not much work has been done in the area of transaction processing in real-time active databases. This paper deals with an important aspect of transaction processing in real-time active databases, namely the problem of assigning priorities to transactions. In these systems, time-constrained transactions trigger other transactions during their execution. We present three policies for assigning priorities to parent, immediate and deferred transactions executing on a multiprocessor system and then evaluate the policies through simulation. The policies use different amounts of semantic information about transactions to assign the priorities. The simulator has been validated against the results of earlier published studies. We conducted experiments in three settings: a task setting, a main memory database setting and a disk-resident database setting. Our results demonstrate that dynamically changing the priorities of transactions, depending on their behavior (triggering rules), yields a substantial improvement in the number of triggering transactions that meet their deadline in all three settings. Edited by Henry F. Korth and Amith Sheth. Received November 1994 / Accepted March 20, 1995     

Parallel mining of association rules from text databases

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm named Parallel Multipass with Inverted Hashing and Pruning (PMIHP) for mining association rules between words in text databases. The characteristics of text databases are quite different from those of retail transaction databases, and existing mining algorithms cannot handle text databases efficiently because of the large number of itemsets (i.e., sets of words) that need to be counted. The new PMIHP algorithm is a parallel version of our Multipass with Inverted Hashing and Pruning (MIHP) algorithm (Holt, Chung in: Proc of the 14th IEEE int’l conf on tools with artificial intelligence, 2002, pp 49–56), which was shown to be quite efficient than other existing algorithms in the context of mining text databases. The PMIHP algorithm reduces the overhead of communication between miners running on different processors because they are mining local databases asynchronously and prune the global candidates by using the Inverted Hashing and Pruning technique. Compared with the well-known Count Distribution algorithm (Agrawal, Shafer in: (1996) IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 8(6):962–969), PMIHP demonstrates superior performance characteristics for mining association rules in large text databases, and when the minimum support level is low, its speedup is superlinear as the number of processors increases. These experiments were performed on a cluster of Linux workstations using a collection of Wall Street Journal articles. This research was supported in part by Ohio Board of Regents, LexisNexis, and AFRL/Wright Brothers Institute (WBI).     

On periodic resource scheduling for continuous-media databases

The Enhanced Pay-Per-View (EPPV) model for providing continuous-media services associates with each continuous-media clip a display frequency that depends on the clip's popularity. The aim is to increase the number of clients that can be serviced concurrently beyond the capacity limitations of available resources, while guaranteeing a constraint on the response time. This is achieved by sharing periodic continuous-media streams among multiple clients. The EPPV model offers a number of advantages over other data-sharing schemes (e.g., batching), which make it more attractive to large-scale service providers. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the resource-scheduling problems associated with supporting EPPV for continuous-media clips with (possibly) different display rates, frequencies, and lengths. Our main objective is to maximize the amount of disk bandwidth that is effectively scheduled under the given data layout and storage constraints. Our formulation gives rise to -hard combinatorial optimization problems that fall within the realm of hard real-time scheduling theory. Given the intractability of the problems, we propose novel heuristic solutions with polynomial-time complexity. We also present preliminary experimental results for the average case behavior of the proposed scheduling schemes and examine how they compare to each other under different workloads. A major contribution of our work is the introduction of a robust scheduling framework that, we believe, can provide solutions for a variety of realistic EPPV resource-scheduling scenarios, as well as any scheduling problem involving regular, periodic use of a shared resource. Based on this framework, we propose various interesting research directions for extending the results presented in this paper. Received June 9, 1998 / Accepted October 13, 1998     

Real time fuzzy scheduling rules in FMS

This paper presents a real-time fuzzy expert system to scheduling parts for a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). First, some vagueness and uncertainties in scheduling rules are indicated and then a fuzzy-logic approach is proposed to improve the system performance by considering multiple performance measures. This approach focuses on characteristics of the system's status, instead of parts, to assign priorities to the parts waiting to be processed. Secondly, a simulation model is developed and it has shown that the proposed fuzzy logic-based decision making process keeps all performance measures at a good level. The proposed approach provides a promising alternative framework in solving scheduling problems in FMSs, in contrast to traditional rules, by making use of intelligent tools.     

Analysis and optimization of active databases

We introduce a new formal semantics for active databases that relies on a transaction rewriting technique. A user-defined transaction, which is viewed here as a sequence of atomic database updates forming a semantic atomic unit, is translated by means of active rules into induced one(s). These transactions embody active rule semantics which can be either immediate or deferred. Rule semantics, confluence, equivalence and optimization are then formally investigated and characterized in a solid framework that naturally extends a known model for relational database transactions.