Mining constraint violations

Abstract

In this article, we introduce pesudoconstraints , a novel data mining pattern aimed at identifying rare events in databases. At first, we formally define pesudoconstraints using a probabilistic model and provide a statistical test to identify pesudoconstraints in a database. Then, we focus on a specific class of pesudoconstraints, named cycle pesudoconstraints , which often occur in databases. We define cycle pesudoconstraints in the context of the ER model and present an automatic method for detecting cycle pesudoconstraints from a relational database. Finally, we present an experiment to show cycle pesudoconstraints “at work” on real data.