Validation of association rules by interactive mosaic plots

Abstract

Association Rules have been proposed by Agrawal et al. (1993) in the context of market basket analysis. They were invented to provide an automated process, which could find connections among items, that were not known before, especially to answer questions like: “which items are likely to be bought together?”. Typically, the data to be examined consists of customer purchases, i.e. a set of items bought by a customer over a period of time. The standard way of storing such data is the following: To be able to identify each customer the transactions are stored with unique numbers, the transaction identification (TID). Beside that, we have a set of different items, the so-called itemset. \(\mathcal{I} = \{ {i_1},{i_2}, \ldots,{i_m}\}\). The data or database D is a set of purchases (transactions), where each transaction T includes a set of items, such that \(T \subset \mathcal{I}\). A transaction T is said to contain a set of items X, if X is a subset of T.