A survey of evolutionary computation for association rule mining

Abstract

Association Rule Mining (ARM) is a significant task for discovering frequent patterns in data mining. It has achieved great success in a plethora of applications such as market basket, computer networks, recommendation systems, and healthcare. In the past few years, evolutionary computation-based ARM has emerged as one of the most popular research areas for addressing the high computation time of traditional ARM. Although numerous papers have been published, there is no comprehensive analysis of existing evolutionary ARM methodologies. In this paper, we review emerging research of evolutionary computation for ARM. We discuss the applications on evolutionary computations for different types of ARM approaches including numerical rules, fuzzy rules, high-utility itemsets, class association rules, and rare association rules. Evolutionary ARM algorithms were classified into four main groups in terms of the evolutionary approach, including evolution-based, swarm intelligence-based, physics-inspired, and hybrid approaches. Furthermore, we discuss the remaining challenges of evolutionary ARM and discuss its applications and future topics.