Rule-ranking method based on item utility in adaptive rule model

Abstract

BackgroundDecision-making is an important part of most human activities regardless of their daily activities, profession, or political inclination. Some decisions are relatively simple specifically when the consequences are insignificant while others can be very complex and have significant effects. Real-life decision problems generally involve several conflicting points of view (criteria) needed to be considered and this is the reason recent decision-making processes are usually supported by data as indicated by different data mining techniques. Data mining is the process of extracting data to obtain useful information and a promising and widely applied method is association rule mining which has the ability to identify interesting relationships between sets of items in a dataset and predict the associative behavior for new data. However, the number of rules generated in association rules can be very large, thereby making the exploitation process difficult. This means it is necessary to prioritize the selection of more valuable and relevant rules.MethodsTherefore, this study proposes a method to rank rules based on the lift ratio value calculated from the frequency and utility of the item. The three main functions in proposed method are mining of association rules from different databases (in terms of sources, characteristics, and attributes), automatic threshold value determination process, and prioritization of the rules produced.ResultsExperiments conducted on six datasets showed that the number of rules generated by the adaptive rule model is higher and sorted from the largest lift ratio value compared to the apriori algorithm.