What is Incremental Search

Mining functional dependencies (FDs) from databases has been identified as an important database analysis technique. It has received considerable research interest in recent years. However, most current data mining techniques for determining functional dependencies deal only with crisp databases. Although various forms of fuzzy functional dependencies (FFDs) have been proposed for fuzzy databases, they emphasized conceptual viewpoints and only a few mining algorithms are given. In this research, we propose methods to validate and incrementally search for FFDs from similarity-based fuzzy relational databases. For a given pair of attributes, the validation of FFDs is based on fuzzy projection and fuzzy selection operations. In addition, the property that FFDs are monotonic in the sense that r1 ? r2 implies FDa(r1) ? FDa(r2) is shown. An incremental search algorithm for FFDs based on this property is then presented. Experimental results showing the behavior of the search algorithm are discussed.