A new form of pattern referred to as a fully dependent pattern or d-pattern is provided. The d-pattern captures dependence among a set of items based on a dependency test. An efficient algorithm is provided for discovering all d-patterns in data. Specifically, a linear algorithm is provided for testing whether a pattern is an d-pattern. Further, a pruning algorithm is provided that prunes the search space effectively. Still further, a level-wise algorithm for mining d-patterns is provided.