Pattern extraction from data

Searching for patterns is one of the main goals in data mining. Patterns have important applications in many KDD domains like rule extraction or classification. In this paper we present some methods of rule extraction by generalizing the existing approaches for the pattern problem. These methods, called partition of attribute values or grouping of attribute values, can be applied to decision tables with symbolic value attributes. If data tables contain symbolic and numeric attributes, some of the proposed methods can be used jointly with discretization methods. Moreover, these methods are applicable for incomplete data. The optimization problems for grouping of attribute values are either NP.-complete or NP.-hard. Hence we propose some heuristics returning approximate solutions for such problems.