Qualitative Reasoning and Data Mining

In this paper, we introduce a new data mining framework that is based on qualitative reasoning. We consider databases where the item domains are of different types, such as numerical values, time intervals and spatial regions. Then, for the considered tasks, we associate to each item a constraint network in a qualitative formalism representing the relations between all the pairs of objects of the database w.r.t. this item. In this context, the introduced data mining problems consist in discovering qualitative covariations between items. In a sense, our framework can be seen as a generalization of gradual itemset mining. In order to solve the introduced problem, we use a declarative approach based on the satisfiability problem in classical propositional logic (SAT). Indeed, we define SAT encodings where the models represent the desired patterns. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Information systems → Data mining; Information systems → Association rules; Theory of computation → Constraint and logic programming; Computing methodologies → Knowledge representation and reasoning