An Analysis on Characteristics of Negative Association Rules

Abstract

Association rules are one of the data and web mining techniques which aim to discover the frequent patterns among itemsets in a transactional database. Frequent patterns and correlation between itemsets in datasets and databases are extracted by these interesting rules. The association rules are positive or negative, and each has its own specific characteristics and definitions. The mentioned algorithms of the discovery of association rules are always facing challenges, including the extraction of only positive rules, while negative rules in databases are also important for a manager’s decision making. Also, the threshold level for support and confidence criteria is always manual with trial and error by the user and the proper place or the characteristics of datasets is not clear for these rules. This research analyses the behavior of the negative association rules based on trial and error. After analyzing the available algorithms, the most efficient algorithm is implemented and then the negative rules are extracted. This test repeats on several standard datasets to evaluate the behavior of the negative rules. The analyses of the achieved outputs reveal that some of the interesting patterns are detected by the negative rules, while the positive rules could not detect such helpful rules. This study emphasizes that extracting only positive rules for covering association rules is not enough.