Explain four methods for the generation of concept hierarchies for nominal data.

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 Concept Hierarchy Generation for Nominal Data

We now look at data transformation for nominal data. In particular, we study concept hierarchy generation for nominal attributes. Nominal attributes have a finite (but possibly large) number of distinct values, with no ordering among the values. Examples include geographic_location, job_category, and item type.

Manual definition of concept hierarchies can be a tedious and time-consuming task for a user or a domain expert. Fortunately, many hierarchies are implicit within the database schema and can be automatically defined at the schema definition level. The concept hierarchies can be used to transform the data into multiple levels of granularity. For example, data mining patterns regarding sales may be found relating to specific regions or countries, in addition to individual branch locations.

We study four methods for the generation of concept hierarchies for nominal data, as follows.

1. Specification of a partial ordering of attributes explicitly at the schema level by users or experts: Concept hierarchies for nominal attributes or dimensions typically involve a group of attributes. A user or expert can easily define a concept hierarchy by specifying a partial or total ordering of the attributes at the schema level. For example, suppose that a relational database contains the following group of attributes: street, city, province_or_state, and country. 

2. Specification of a portion of a hierarchy by explicit data grouping: This is essentially the manual definition of a portion of a concept hierarchy. In a large database, it is unrealistic to define an entire concept hierarchy by explicit value enumeration. On the contrary, we can easily specify explicit groupings for a small portion of intermediate-level data. For example, after specifying that province and country form a hierarchy at the schema level, a user could define some intermediate levels manually, such as "(Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) belongs to prairies Canada and "{British Columbia, prairies Canada) belongs to  Western Canada."

3. Specification of a set of attributes, but not of their partial ordering: A user may specify a set of attributes forming a concept hierarchy, but omit to explicitly state their partial ordering. The system can then try to automatically generate the attribute ordering so as to construct a meaningful concept hierarchy.

4. Specification of only a partial set of attributes: Sometimes a user can be careless when defining a hierarchy, or have only a vague idea about what should be included in a hierarchy. Consequently, the user may have included only a small subset of the relevant attributes in the hierarchy specification. For example, instead of including all of the hierarchically relevant attributes for location, the user may have specified only street and city. To handle such partially specified hierarchies, it is important to embed data semantics in the database schema so that attributes with tight semantic connections can be pinned together. In this way, the specification of one attribute may trigger a whole group of semantically tightly linked attributes to be "dragged in to form a complete hierarchy. Users, however, should have the option to override this feature, as necessary.



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