ASSOCIATION RULE MINING CONCEPTS AND APPROACHES

Data mining can be used to uncover patterns in data but is often carried out only on samples of data. The mining process will be ineffective if the samples are not a good representation of the larger body of data. Data mining cannot discover patterns that may be present in the larger body of data if those patterns are not present in the sample being "mined". Inability to find patterns may become a cause for some disputes between customers and service providers. Therefore, data mining is not foolproof but may be useful if sufficiently representative data samples are collected. The discovery of a particular pattern in a particular set of data does not necessarily mean that a pattern is found elsewhere in the larger data from which that sample was drawn. An important part of the process is the verification and validation of patterns on other samples of data.