Finding collective baskets and inference rules for internet or intranet mining for large data bases

A computer method of online mining of inference rules in a large database comprising a preprocessing stage and an online rule generation stage. The pre-processing stage includes first finding itemsets that possess a minimum computed collective strength K1, and second, pruning the itemsets with inference strength below a predetermined inference strength, K2. The online rule generation stage utilizes the itemsets organized into an adjacency lattice to generate inference rules with inference strength K2.