Uniqueness Mining

Abstract

In this paper we consider the problem of extracting the special properties of any given record in a dataset. We are interested in determining what makes a given record unique or different from the ma- jority of the records in a dataset. In the real world, records typically represent objects or people and it is often worthwhile to know what spe- cial properties are present in each object or person, so that we can make the best use of them. This problem has not been considered earlier in the research literature. We approach this problem using ideas from clustering, attribute oriented induction (AOI) and frequent itemset mining. Most of the time consuming work is done in a preprocessing stage and the online computation of the uniqueness of a given record is instantaneous.