FAR-miner: a fast and efficient algorithm for fuzzy association rule mining

Abstract

Association rule mining ARM algorithms work only with binary attributes, and expect quantitative attributes to be converted to binary ones using sharp partitions, like 'age = [25, 60]'. A better alternative is to convert quantitative attributes to fuzzy attributes, like 'age = middle-aged', to eliminate loss of information due to sharp partitioning, and then run a fuzzy ARM algorithm. The most popular fuzzy ARM algorithms are fuzzy adaptations of apriori. Fuzzy apriori, like apriori, is a slow algorithm, especially for most medium-sized 500 K to 1 M and large > 1 M datasets. We propose a new fuzzy ARM algorithm called FAR-miner for fast and efficient performance. Through experiments we show that FAR-miner is 8-19 and 6-10 times faster on large and medium-sized datasets respectively as compared to fuzzy apriori. This efficiency is due to properties like two-phased multiple-partition tidlist-style processing and byte-vector representation and effective compression of tidlists.