ARtool Frequently Asked Questions
                       written by Laurentiu Cristofor

                                version 1.0
                        Last updated on: 01/12/2002


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Q: What is this file?

A: It's a Frequently Asked Questions for ARtool, or for short, a FAQ,
but don't ask me how to pronounce that acronym because I never figured
it out ;)
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Q: What is ARtool?

A: ARtool is a Java application for mining association rules in binary
databases. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License and
has been implemented by Laurentiu Cristofor, that is me. I implemented
the algorithms in ARtool for the research I did toward my PhD Thesis
at University of Massachusetts at Boston. I have designed or
participated in the design of some of these algorithms, while the
others have been implemented for reference or out of curiosity.

ARtool comprises three components: a set of Java packages, a set of
command line tools, and a graphical user interface (GUI).

For more information on using ARtool see the various text documents
that came with it, as well as the online help topics accessible while
running the ARtool GUI.
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Q: What is the relation between ARtool and ARMiner?
Q: What is ARMiner?

A: ARMiner is another data mining project that was implemented at
UMass/Boston as a software engineering project. I was the project
leader of the team that implemented ARMiner and I implemented the core
mining classes, which now, after several revisions, are part of the
laur.dm.ar package. One of ARMiner's goals was to be an educational
tool that an instructor could use in a course to teach students about
data mining algorithms. In this scenario students could experiment by
adding their own algorithms, executing them, and seeing the
results. This lead to the client-server design of ARMiner, to the
group and user management feature, and to the capability of
dynamically adding new algorithms to a running server.

Recently, I wanted to have the ability of selecting among different
algorithms for generating association rules out of frequent itemsets,
the second stage of association rule mining. I also wanted the
interface to display more information about the mining
results. Modifying ARMiner to obtain this would have taken too much
time, so instead I decided to start a new project whose goal would be
to provide a single user mining application with more interface
features. ARtool was the result and it only took me a week to build
the interface for this new application.
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Q: What are the differences between ARMiner and ARtool?

A: The features of ARMiner that are not present in ARtool are:

      - the client-server design
      - the group and user management
      - the addition of algorithms at runtime
      - the benchmarking

I designed ARtool to be a single-user application so I dropped the
first two features mentioned above. Since I don't add new algorithms
every day, I also dropped the dynamic addition of algorithms. Now you
need to add your new algorithm to ARtool by editing the source code
and recompiling the application. The benchmarking is not present in
the current release of ARtool, although it might show up in a future
version. I prefer to use the command line tools for comparing the
behavior of the algorithms.

The new features of ARtool are:

      - a set of command line tools that allow mining, synthetic
        database generation, operations on databases, etc
      - the GUI gives more information about a selected database
      - the GUI gives more information about the frequent itemsets
      - the GUI has a log window that keeps track of all operations
        performed
      - algorithm execution and database generation can now be
        interrupted
      - lengthy tasks are executed in threads and do not freeze the
        interface
      - an online help system - provides a quick introduction to
        association rule mining and to using ARtool
      - the GUI is easier to navigate since I use dialogs sparingly
      - there are plenty of tooltips to help the novice user

Also, all the classes in the laur.dm.ar package have been revised. I
have rewrote some of them to make the code easier to understand. If
you have used the classes in ARMiner for your own projects, then you
should check the javadoc sources to see what methods have disappeared,
what method names have been changed, and what new methods and classes
have appeared. All mining algorithms have been retrofitted to be
subclasses of laur.tools.AbortableThread, so that they could be
executed as threads, and their execution could be interrupted upon a
user request.
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