A new method for mining association rules from a collection of XML documents

With the sheer amount of data stored, presented and exchanged using XML nowadays, the ability to extract interesting knowledge from XML data sources becomes increasingly important and desirable. In support of this trend, several encouraging attempts at developing methods for mining XML data have been proposed. However, efficiency and simplicity are still barrier for further development. In this paper, we show that any XML document can be mined for association rules using only a specially devised hierarchical data structure called HoPS without multiple XML data scans. It is flexible and powerful enough to represent both simple and complex structured association relationships inherent in XML data.