Database summarization using fuzzy ISA hierarchies

Summary discovery is one of the major components of knowledge discovery in databases, which provides the user with comprehensive information for grasping the essence from a large amount of information in a database. We propose an interactive top down summary discovery process which utilizes fuzzy ISA hierarchies as domain knowledge. We define a generalized tuple as a representational form of a database summary including fuzzy concepts. By virtue of fuzzy ISA hierarchies where fuzzy ISA relationships common in actual domains are naturally expressed, the discovery process comes up with more accurate database summaries. We also present an informativeness measure for distinguishing generalized tuples that delivers much information to users, based on C. Shannon´s (1948) information theory