A novel hybrid GA–PSO framework for mining quantitative association rules

Abstract

Discovering association rules is a useful and common technique for data mining in which dependencies among datasets are shown. Discovering the rules from continuous numeric datasets is one of the common challenges in data mining. Furthermore, another restriction imposed by algorithms in this area is the need to determine the minimum threshold for the criteria of support and confidence. By drawing on two heuristic optimization techniques, to wit, the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, a hybrid algorithm for extracting quantitative association rules was developed in this research. Accurate and interpretable rules result from the integration of the multiple objectives GA with the multiple objective PSO algorithms, which redresses the balance in the exploitation and exploration tasks. The useful and appropriate rules and the most suitable numerical intervals are discovered by proposing a multi-criteria method in which there is no need to discretize numerical values and to determine threshold values of minimum support and confidence. Different criteria are used to determine appropriate rules. In this algorithm, the selected rules are extracted based on confidence, interestingness and comprehensibility. The results gained over five real-world datasets evidence the effectiveness of the proposed method. By hybridization of the GA and the PSO algorithm, the proposed approach has achieved considerable improvements compared with the basic algorithms in the criteria of the number of extracted rules from dataset, high confidence measure and support percentage.