Mining closed intervals in an interval database: An incremental method

In this paper, an incremental method for mining the set of closed intervals in an interval database is presented. In fast-growing data, new intervals are added to an interval database over time. Some earlier methods for mining closed intervals in an interval database assumed the database to be static and hence such methods are not effective for databases whose sizes are incremented over time. Though an incremental method for mining closed intervals has been proposed earlier, the incremental method presented in this paper for the same problem is more time-efficient than the previous method. The method proposed in this paper takes only O(n) time to update the set of closed intervals in an interval database containing n intervals after a new interval is added to it, as compared to O(n²) time taken by the earlier incremental method. The method proposed in this paper has been tested on real-life and synthetic data and the results are reported.