Mining constraint violations

In this article, we introduce pesudoconstraints, a novel data mining pattern aimed at identifying rare events in databases. At first, we formally define pesudoconstraints using a probabilistic model and provide a statistical test to identify pesudoconstraints in a database. Then, we focus on a specific class of pesudoconstraints, named cycle pesudoconstraints, which often occur in databases. We define cycle pesudoconstraints in the context of the ER model and present an automatic method for detecting cycle pesudoconstraints from a relational database. Finally, we present an experiment to show cycle pesudoconstraints “at work” on real data.