An interactive data mining system (100, 3000) that is suitable for data mining large high dimensional (e.g., 200 dimension) data sets is provided. The system graphically presents rules in a context allowing users to readily gain an intuitive appreciation of the significance of important attributes (data fields) in the data. The system (100, 3000) uses metrics to quantify the importance of the various data attributes, data values, attribute/value pairs, ranks them according to the metrics and displays histograms and lists of attributes and values in order according to the metric, thereby allowing the user to rapidly find the most interesting aspects of the data. The system explores the impact of user defined constraints and presents histograms and rule cubes including superposed and interleaved rule cubes showing the effect of the constraints.