On a fuzzy group-by clause in SQLf

Group-by is a core database operation that is used extensively in data analysis and decision support systems. In many application scenarios, it appears useful to group values according to their compliance with a certain concept instead of founding the grouping on value equality. In this paper, we propose a new SQLf construct that supports fuzzy-partition-based group-by (FGB). We show that FGB can be used to generate fuzzy summaries as well as to mine fuzzy association rules in a practical and efficient way.