Patent 7979473 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on July, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An association rule is extracted by processing a database partitioned into record units in which the same attribute is missing, from a database including missing values. The association rule is extracted from the database including the missing by means for partitioning a database so that a database including a missing analysis object becomes record blocks in which the same attribute is missing, and means for estimating an upper threshold of a support value in the entire database from local support counts in partitioned databases and thereby limiting records for which the support count is counted.