Abstract It is deserved to foresee how many association rules will be mined from a given database without taking support and confidence in consideration. Hence the concept of expecting association rule is proposed in this paper to turn the above problem into how to calculate the base number of an expecting association rule set. The categorical and continuous computing formulas are presented respectively. The exclusive property of items in itemset is discussed after the transformation of continuous data into categorical data. An expanding matrix and an expanding method is deduced by the exclusive property. This method is used to calculate the base number of an expecting association rule set of continuous dataset in a brief way. The analysis and test results show that the size of an expecting association rule set decrease as the amount of exclusive items increase. These results are helpful to understand the essence of association rule mining and furtherly develop more highly efficient mining algorithm.
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2010, Vol. 23 
