Finding sporadic rules in the diagnosis of the Erythemato-Squamous diseases

Abstract

Most previous research into association rule data mining has focused on finding frequent rules; rules with high support and high confidence. However detecting rare or sporadic association rules, which have low support and high confidence, is a worthwhile task as well, as they represent rare, but potentially interesting and important associations. Mining rare or sporadic rules is a difficult data mining problem, and most previous approaches use an Apriori [1] like method [2-9]. However in order for Apriori to find rare rules, minimum support must be set very low, which results in a large amount of redundant rules and a long runtime. We previously proposed the Apriori-Inverse [10] and MIISR [11] algorithms to find sporadic rules quickly and efficiently. This paper provides an insight into the qualitative results produced by our proposed algorithms. We explore a specific real-world case study in more detail to get a qualitative understanding, namely the Dermatology dataset, for the diagnosis of the Erythemato-Squamous diseases. We show that traditional unmodified Apriori is not well suited to this task, and that our proposed algorithms are capable of producing interesting sporadic rules without having any expert domain knowledge.