Discovery of multivalued dependencies from database relations is viewed
as a search in a hypothesis space dened according to the generalisation
relationship among multivalued dependencies. Two algorithms for the discovery
of multivalued dependencies from relations are presented. The topdown
algorithm enumerates the hypotheses from the most general to more
specic hypotheses which are checked on the input relation. The bottomup
algorithm rst computes the invalid multivalued dependencies. Starting
with the most general dependencies, the algorithm iteratively renes the
set of dependencies to conform with each particular invalid dependency. The implementation of the algorithms is analysed and some empirical results
are presented.