On skyline groups

We formulate and investigate the novel problem of finding the skyline k-tuple groups from an n-tuple dataset - i.e., groups of k tuples which are not dominated by any other group of equal size, based on aggregate-based group dominance relationship. The major technical challenge is to identify effective anti-monotonic properties for pruning the search space of skyline groups. To this end, we show that the anti-monotonic property in the well-known Apriori algorithm does not hold for skyline group pruning. We then identify order-specific property which applies to SUM, MIN, and MAX and weak candidate-generation property which applies to MIN and MAX only. Experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets verify that the proposed algorithms achieve orders of magnitude performance gain over a baseline method.