The Apriori algorithm requires the input data to be supplied in a certain standard format. The
standard XML document can be very complex. Therefore, the use of a “Standard Data Source
Template (SDST) concept “ as proposed in the IEEE paper “Mining Association rules from
complex and irregular XML Documents using XSLT and XQuery” by Xinwei Wang and
Chunjing Cao [2] can be used to create dynamic XML for an XML document of any complex
structure. It is a simple XML document having a pre-defined structure. The benefit of using this
XML structure is that it can accommodate the changes in the number of input attributes and still
be a valid input for processing the input data.