FD/spl I.bar/Mine: discovering functional dependencies in a database using equivalences

Abstract

The discovery of FDs from databases has recently become a significant research problem. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called FD-Mine. FD-Mine takes advantage of the rich theory of FDs to reduce both the size of the dataset and the number of FDs to be checked by using discovered equivalences. We show that the pruning does not lead to loss of information. Experiments on 15 UCI datasets show that FD-Mine can prune more candidates than previous methods.