29. The article of manufacture recited in claim 23, the method further comprising the generating a selected set of items including pruning non-interesting items from the set.
23. An article of manufacture tangibly embodying a program of machine-readable instructions executable by a digital processing apparatus to perform a method for discovering association rules using item constraints, the method comprising: generating a set of selected items from a database based on predefined constraints, the predefined constraints involving one or more items of a mining input expression; determining a support value for an itemset based upon the number of times the itemset appears in the database; entering the itemset into a set of large itemsets if the support value of the itemset is greater than a minimum support value and the itemset contains at least one of the selected items; and outputting an association rule when the number of times the entered itemset appears in the database bears a predetermined relationship to a number of times an associated itemset appears in the database and thereby satisfies a minimum confidence constraint.