Abstract: A computer method of online mining of association rules by pre-processing data within the constraint of available memory. The required computational effort for performing online mining of association rules is reduced by a two-step procedure that involves first creating an adjacency lattice which pre-stores a number of large itemsets at a level of support dictated by available memory. The lattice structure is useful for both finding the itemsets quickly, by reducing the amount of disk I/O required to perform the analysis, and also using the itemsets in order to generate the rules. Once the adjacency lattice is obtained, the second (mining) step is further comprised of two phases. The first phase involves a search algorithm used to find the corresponding itemsets at user specified levels of minimum support. The second phase involves using those itemsets to generate association rules at the user specified level of minimum confidence.

Abstract: An apparatus and a method for constructing a multidimensional index tree which minimizes the time to access data objects and is resilient to the skewness of the data. This is achieved through successive partitioning of all given data objects by considering one level at a time starting with one partition and using a top-down approach until each final partition can fit within a leaf node. Subdividing the data objects is via a global optimization approach to minimize the area overlap and perimeter of the minimum bounding rectangles covered by each node. The current invention divides the index construction problem into two subproblems: the first one addresses the tightness of the packing (in terms of area, overlap and perimeter) using a small fan out at each index node and the other one handles the fan out issue to improve index page utilization. These two stages are referred to as binarization and compression.

Abstract: Portions of multimedia program (presentation) are repetitively broadcast to receiving stations with subsequent portions being broadcast less frequently than preceding portions. Blocks of at least one of the portions are broadcast in varying permutations from one repetition to a next repetition. Further, each portion is of a length which is proportional to a sum of the lengths of all preceding portions. A receiver is provided with selects blocks to be skipped (in a pyramid type broadcast) based on information indicative of the permutation selected by the server. The receiver determines the number of blocks to skip before buffering the next block for the video being viewed.