Method and apparatus for discovering patterns in binary or categorical data

The present invention relates to a computationally efficient method of finding patterns in any data that can be expressed in the form of arrays of binary features or arrays of categorical features. This includes data represented by continuous-valued attributes that can be transformed to a categorical representation, such as the discovery of patterns of genetic variability that may be causally related to diseases or traits, as well as the discovery of patterns of protein biomarkers that may be used for medical diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics. The invention further relates to a program storage device having instructions for controlling a computer system to perform the methods, and to a program storage device containing data structures used in the practice of the methods.