Quantitative Association Rules Research Articles

Mining positive and negative rules via one-sided fuzzy three-way concept lattices

Mining association rules are a major area of research in data mining, as there are typically a large number of rules in each data set. And extracting necessary rules from each data set requires efficiency and careful consideration. In this paper, we propose a novel mining algorithm for efficiently acquiring positive and negative quantitative association rules (positive and negative QA-rules) in a fuzzy or multi-valued ordered context based on a three-way concept lattice (3CL). To this end, a new 3CL, called a one-sided fuzzy three-way concept lattice (OF3WC-lattice), is constructed based on a fuzzy formal context (FFcontext). The designed OF3WC-lattice describes the dependencies between objects and attributes, whether in the original FFcontext or its complement context. And the OF3WC-lattice is based on two kinds of two-way operators to make it consistent with practical linguistics. In addition, we propose an algorithm for constructing an OF3WC-lattice through analyzing relationships between the novel concept lattice and traditional one-sided fuzzy concept lattices. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mines positive and negative QA-rules.

The Application of Big Data Technology in the Efficient Development of Cross-Border E-Commerce Industry

Abstract As a typical ecology of “Internet+”, cross-border e-commerce enterprises have a huge amount of data, but it is difficult to use it effectively. This paper researches the generation and development of cross-border e-commerce big data, proposes the association rule algorithm based on Apriori to mine and analyze the cross-border e-commerce data, improves the problem of high time cost of Apriori algorithm, optimizes the clustering analysis method of quantitative attributes, and adopts the distance-based quantitative association rule to search for frequent classes, and analyzes the big data of cross-border e-commerce platforms based on the improved algorithm. Big data of cross-border e-commerce platform. Based on the analysis of the high demand of the cross-border e-commerce platform based on big data, the prediction error rate is 1.75%, 2.27%, 5.48%, 2.49%, 2.91%, 2.08%, 10.18% and 1.81% in order. In terms of user portraits, the accuracy of big data analysis of users’ purchasing power, purchasing habits and consumption intentions reached 86.10%, 73.43% and 90.48% on average. Big data technology helps cross-border e-commerce companies optimize the industry chain, improve operational management efficiency, enhance consumer experience and establish a brand effect.

A new approach based on association rules to add explainability to time series forecasting models

Machine learning and deep learning have become the most useful and powerful tools in the last years to mine information from large datasets. Despite the successful application to many research fields, it is widely known that some of these solutions based on artificial intelligence are considered black-box models, meaning that most experts find difficult to explain and interpret the models and why they generate such outputs. In this context, explainable artificial intelligence is emerging with the aim of providing black-box models with sufficient interpretability. Thus, models could be easily understood and further applied. This work proposes a novel method to explain black-box models, by using numeric association rules to explain and interpret multi-step time series forecasting models. Thus, a multi-objective algorithm is used to discover quantitative association rules from the target model. Then, visual explanation techniques are applied to make the rules more interpretable. Data from Spanish electricity energy consumption has been used to assess the suitability of the proposal.

Mining associations between glycemic variability in awake-time and in-sleep among non-diabetic adults.

It is often assumed that healthy people have the genuine ability to maintain tight blood glucose regulation. However, a few recent studies revealed that glucose dysregulation such as hyperglycemia may occur even in people who are considered normoglycemic by standard measures and were more prevalent than initially thought, suggesting that more investigations are needed to fully understand the within-day glucose dynamics of healthy people. In this paper, we conducted an analysis on a multi-modal dataset to examine the relationships between glycemic variability when people were awake and that when they were sleeping. The interstitial glucose levels were measured with a wearable continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) technology FreeStyle Libre 2 at every 15 min interval. In contrast to the traditional single-time-point measurements, the CGM data allow the investigation into the temporal patterns of glucose dynamics at high granularity. Sleep onset and offset timestamps were recorded daily with a Fitbit Charge 3 wristband. Our analysis leveraged the sleep data to split the glucose readings into segments of awake-time and in-sleep, instead of using fixed cut-off time points as has been done in existing literature. We combined repeated measure correlation analysis and quantitative association rules mining, together with an original post-filtering method, to identify significant and most relevant associations. Our results showed that low overall glucose in awake time was strongly correlated to low glucose in subsequent sleep, which in turn correlated to overall low glucose in the next day. Moreover, both analysis techniques identified significant associations between the minimal glucose reading in sleep and the low blood glucose index the next day. In addition, the association rules discovered in this study achieved high confidence (0.75-0.88) and lift (4.1-11.5), which implies that the proposed post-filtering method was effective in selecting quality rules.

ARHap: Association Rule Haplotype Phasing.

This article proposes a novel approach for Individual Human phasing through discovery of interesting hidden relations among single variant sites. The proposed framework, called ARHap, learns strong association rules among variant loci on the genome and develops a combinatorial approach for fast and accurate haplotype phasing based on the discovered associations. ARHap is composed of two main modules or processing phases. In the first phase, called association rule learning, ARHap identifies quantitative association rules from a collection of DNA reads of the organism under study, resulting in a set of strong rules that reveal the inter-dependency of alleles. In the next phase, called haplotype reconstruction, we develop algorithms to utilize the learned rules to construct highly reliable haplotypes at individual single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites. ARHap has several features that lead to both fast and accurate haplotyping. It uses an incremental haplotype reconstruction approach that enables us to generate association rules according to the unreconstructed SNP sites during each round of the algorithm. During each round, the association rule learning module generates rules while constraining the length of the rules and limiting the rules to those that contribute to reconstruction of unreconstructed sites only. The framework begins by generating rules of small size and highly strong. The rule length can increase and/or criteria about strongness of the rule are adjusted gradually, during subsequent rounds, if some SNP sites have remained unreconstructed. This adaptive approach, which uses feedback from haplotype reconstruction module, eliminates generation of rules that do not contribute to haplotype reconstruction as well as weak rules that may introduce error in the final haplotypes. Extensive experimental analyses on datasets representing diploid organisms demonstrate superiority of ARHap in diploid haplotyping compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms. In particular, we show that this novel approach to haplotype phasing not only is fast but also achieves significantly better accuracy performance compared to other read-based computational approaches.

Performance evaluation of machine learning for fault selection in power transmission lines

Learning methods have been increasingly used in power engineering to perform various tasks. In this paper, a fault selection procedure in double-circuit transmission lines employing different learning methods is accordingly proposed. In the proposed procedure, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is used to pre-process raw data from the transmission line before it is fed into the learning algorithm, which will detect and classify any fault based on a training period. The performance of different machine learning algorithms is then numerically compared through simulations. The comparison indicates that an artificial neural network (ANN) achieves remarkable accuracy of 98.47%. As a drawback, the ANN method cannot provide explainable results and is also not robust against noisy measurements. Subsequently, it is demonstrated that explainable results can be obtained with high accuracy by using rule-based learners such as the recently developed quantitative association rule mining algorithm (QARMA). The QARMA algorithm outperforms other explainable schemes, while attaining an accuracy of 98%. Besides, it was shown that QARMA leads to a very high accuracy of 97% for highly noisy data. The proposed method was also validated using data from an actual transmission line fault. In summary, the proposed two-step procedure using the DFT combined with either deep learning or rule-based algorithms can accurately and successfully perform fault selection tasks but indicating remarkable advantages of the QARMA due to its explainability and robustness against noise. Those aspects are extremely important if machine learning and other data-driven methods are to be employed in critical engineering applications.

A Discrete Crow Search Algorithm for Mining Quantitative Association Rules

Association rules are the specific data mining methods aiming to discover explicit relations between the different attributes in a large dataset. However, in reality, several datasets may contain both numeric and categorical attributes. Recently, many meta-heuristic algorithms that mimic the nature are developed for solving continuous problems. This article proposes a new algorithm, DCSA-QAR, for mining quantitative association rules based on crow search algorithm (CSA). To accomplish this, new operators are defined to increase the ability to explore the searching space and ensure the transition from the continuous to the discrete version of CSA. Moreover, a new discretization algorithm is adopted for numerical attributes taking into account dependencies probably that exist between attributes. Finally, to evaluate the performance, DCSA-QAR is compared with particle swarm optimization and mono and multi-objective evolutionary approaches for mining association rules. The results obtained over real-world datasets show the outstanding performance of DCSA-QAR in terms of quality measures.

An Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Association Rule Mining Approach to Pattern Discovery in Breast Cancer Dataset

In the literature, several methods explored to analyze breast cancer dataset have failed to sufficiently handle quantitative attribute sharp boundary problem to resolve inter and intra uncertainties in breast cancer dataset analysis. In this study an Interval Type-2 fuzzy association rule mining approach is proposed for pattern discovery in breast cancer dataset. In the first part of this analysis, the interval Type-2 fuzzification of the breast cancer dataset is carried out using Hao and Mendel approach. In the second part, FP-growth algorithm is adopted for associative pattern discovery from the fuzzified dataset from the first part. To define the intuitive words for breast cancer determinant factors and expert data interval, thirty (30) medical experts from specialized hospitals were consulted through questionnaire poling method. To establish the adequacy of the linguistic word defined by the expert, Jaccard similarity measure is used. This analysis is able to discover associative rules with minimum number of symptoms at confidence values as high as 91%. It also identifies High Bare Nuclei and High Uniformity of Cell Shape as strong determinant factors for diagnosing breast cancer. The proposed approach performed better in terms of rules generated when compared with traditional quantitative association rule mining. It is able to eliminate redundant rules which reduce the number of generated rules by 39.5% and memory usage by 22.6%. The discovered rules are viable in building a comprehensive and compact expert driven knowledge�base for breast cancer decision support or expert system

QuantMiner for mining quantitative association rules

In this paper, we propose QUANTMINER, a mining quantitative association rules system. This system is based on a genetic algorithm that dynamically discovers good intervals in association rules by...

Association Rule Mining for Localizing Solar Power in Different Distribution Grid Feeders

The increase in the photovoltaic generation on distribution grids may create problems, such as voltage-violations. To gain situational awareness for system operation, e.g., adjusting the tap-settings of the transformers or adjust capacitor banks, utilities need situational awareness about locations and amounts of photovoltaic powers being generated in different feeders. Unfortunately, many utilities not only lack observability of the distribution grid, e.g., no secondary grid schematics but also have no situational awareness on which feeders solar panels locate. To understand where the solar users are roughly, we propose to use the feeder measurements from utilities with solar panel measurements from third-party solar companies. Due to the property of active correlation detection, we propose several sequentially improved methods based on quantitative association rule mining (QARM), where we also provide a lower bound for performance guarantees based on the amount of available data and the size of the bin for clustering. However, the binning of data leads to information loss. So, we design a band to replace bin for creating a new data mining approach for robustness. We validate our result for the IEEE 4-, 8-, 123-, 8500-bus cases with the Pecan-Street dataset, and also for the IEEE 123-bus case under low/high penetration and with radial/weakly meshed configurations. For realistic validation, we also obtain real data from a utility and a solar power company in the same zip codes in a city of California. Numerical results show accurate associations of feeders and solar panels, leading to increased situational awareness of the secondary distribution grids.

Data mining of solar panel data to analyze the effects of different metals in producing photocurrent

Solar panels are photosensitive devices that generate electric current by being exposed to radiant power. The “Solar Army” research group at FSU’s Department of Chemistry has been collecting solar panel data. These data consist of readings from plates that contain oxides of various metallic elements. Each of these plates is represented by a 6x6 grid of cells, where the leftmost and rightmost cells are known as standards -- typically containing copper and iron respectively. The original data has been preprocessed to represent the data for one of the 6x6 cells of a plate with one data record, including the type of electric lead used, the amount of photocurrent, and the amount of fifteen different metals present on the cell. The goal of this work was to analyze the effects different metals in generating photo current so that the effectiveness of the solar panels can be improved. We used the data mining tool Weka to preprocess and apply class association rules (CAR) mining to discover the combination metals that can produce different intensities of photo current. We also applied quantitative association rule mining to determine if the quantity of metals present can affect the photo current. These test results may be important not only to the Solar Army research group, but also to manufactures and scientists attempting to increase the effectiveness of solar panels.

Clustering-Based Hybrid Approach for Identifying Quantitative Multidimensional Associations Between Patient Attributes, Drugs and Adverse Drug Reactions.

The activity of post-marketing surveillance results in a collection of large amount of data. The analysis of data is very useful for raising early warnings on possible adverse reactions of drugs. Association rule mining techniques have been heavily explored by the research community for identifying binary association between drugs and their adverse effects. But these techniques perform poorly and miss out several interesting associations when it comes to analysis of multidimensional data which may include multiple patient attributes, drugs and adverse drug reactions. In the present work, a clustering-based hybrid approach has been presented for finding quantitative multidimensional association from the large amount of data. Firstly, it employs clustering technique for segmentation of data into semantically coherent clusters. Furthermore, disproportionality method called proportional reporting ratio is applied on clustered data for generating statistically strong associations. The performance of the proposed methodology has been examined on the data taken from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System database corresponding to Aspirin and nine other drugs which are prescribed along with Aspirin. The experimental results show that the proposed approach discovered a number of association rules which are very comprehensive and informative regarding relationship of patient traits and drugs with adverse drug reactions. On comparing experimental results with LPMiner, it is observed that the quantitative association rules discovered by LPMiner are just 8.3% of what have been discovered by the proposed methodology.

Sensitivity Analysis of Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II for Quantitative Association Rules Mining

İkili ya da kesikli değerlere sahip veri kümelerine odaklanan birçok birliktelik kural madenciliği çalışması vardır. Ancak, gerçek dünya uygulamalarındaki veriler genellikle nicel değerlerden oluşmaktadır. Nicel veriler için keşfedilecek kurallarda hangi niteliklerin olacağı ve hangilerinin kuralın solunda hangilerinin sağında olacağının belirlenmesi, ilgili nicel aralıkların en uygun şekilde otomatik ayarlanması; kuralların yoğun nesne kümeleri üretilmeden tek aşamada anlaşılabilir, doğru, güvenilir, ilginç, sürpriz vb. özelliklere sahip olacak şekilde bulunması ve tüm bu işlemlerin her veri tabanı için önceden belirlenmesi gereken metriklere ihtiyaç duyulmadan ayarlanması zor bir problemdir. Yakın zamanda bazı araştırmacılar, nicel birliktelik kural madenciliğini, farklı kriterleri aynı anda en iyi şekilde karşılayacak şekilde, çok amaçlı bir problem olarak düşünmüşlerdir. Bu makalede nicel birliktelik kural madenciliği problemi için anlaşılabilirlik, ilginçlik ve performansı en üst düzeye çıkarmayı amaçlayan çok amaçlı evrimsel algoritmalardan baskın olmayan sıralama genetik algoritma-II temelli QAR-CIP-NSGA-II’nin parametre analizi yapılmıştır. Bu amaçla; nitelikleri nicel değerler alan beş gerçek dünya verisinde QAR-CIP-NSGA-II’nin değerlendirme sayısı, popülasyon sayısı, mutasyon olasılığı, genlik ve eşik değeri gibi parametrelerinin; elde edilen kural sayısı, ortalama destek, güven, lift, kesinlik faktörü, netconf ve kapsanan kayıt sayısını nasıl değiştirdiği kapsamlı bir şekilde bildiğimiz kadarıyla ilk kez bu çalışmada gerçekleştirilmiştir. Detaylı analiz sonuçları karşılaştırmalı tablolar ile sunulmuştur ve yorumlanmıştır.

Enhancing Learning Efficiency of Brain Storm Optimization via Orthogonal Learning Design

In brain storm optimization (BSO), the convergent operation utilizes a clustering strategy to group the population into multiple clusters, and the divergent operation uses this cluster information to generate new individuals. However, this mechanism is inefficient to regulate the exploration and exploitation search. This article first analyzes the main factors that influence the performance of BSO and then proposes an orthogonal learning framework to improve its learning mechanism. In this framework, two orthogonal design (OD) engines (i.e., exploration OD engine and exploitation OD engine) are introduced to discover and utilize useful search experiences for performance improvements. In addition, a pool of auxiliary transmission vectors with different features is maintained and their biases are also balanced by the OD decision mechanism. Finally, the proposed algorithm is verified on a set of benchmarks and is adopted to resolve the quantitative association rule mining problem considering the support, confidence, comprehensibility, and netconf. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is very powerful in optimizing complex functions. It not only outperforms previous versions of the BSO algorithm but also outperforms several famous OD-based algorithms.

Agent Mining Framework for Analyzing Moroccan Olive Oil Datasets

Data mining and intelligent agents have become two promising research areas. Each intelligent agent functions independently while cooperating with other agents, to perform effectively assigned tasks. The main goal of this research, is to provide a mining implementation that can help biological researchers for discovering parameters that affect the cost of olive oil in Morocco. To solve this problem, we used a method involving two data mining techniques, clustering of variables, quantitative association rules and multi-agent system to fuse these two techniques. Therefore, we have developed a multi-agent framework that has been validated by using concrete data from the Provincial Direction of Agriculture of Berkane, Morocco. To prove the performance of our framework, we tested the proposed multi-agent tool using three datasets from different fields. Conforming to biological researchers, our method generates a clear knowledge because the framework proposes high-confidence rules that can correctly identify olive oil factors.

Combining Graph Clustering and Quantitative Association Rules for Knowledge Discovery in Geochemical Data Problem

Identifying geochemical patterns from backgrounds and generating associated mineralization remains challenging due to the complex structure of mineral deposits. To learn how to identify geochemical anomalies that are spatially associated with mineralization, we need in-depth knowledge of the dependence process. Quantitative association rules (QARs) are applied to discover remarkable relations and dependencies between attributes in a dataset, but it is difficult to generate relationships from geochemical data. In previous studies, no methodology to find association rules is proposed to deal with geochemical data problem, and the classical methods designed for Boolean and nominal attributes require previous discretization, which makes the whole process limited in processing complex data. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid method of graph clustering and quantitative association rules (GCQAR) as a new way of identifying significant geochemical patterns. Graph Clustering (GC) is used as partitioning paradigm because of its ability to handle large-scale datasets. The GC is based on modularity to effectively generate the groups of the graph, to avoid the over-partitioning, and to cover all the rules. In each partition, a set of geochemical quantitative association rules is produced. The results obtained in the experimental study performed on data collected in the field of Xiaoshan, Henan province, China. Our GCQAR has significant benefits in terms of recognition geochemical patterns compared to the traditional methods used in the field of geochemistry.

A novel hybrid GA–PSO framework for mining quantitative association rules

Discovering association rules is a useful and common technique for data mining in which dependencies among datasets are shown. Discovering the rules from continuous numeric datasets is one of the common challenges in data mining. Furthermore, another restriction imposed by algorithms in this area is the need to determine the minimum threshold for the criteria of support and confidence. By drawing on two heuristic optimization techniques, to wit, the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, a hybrid algorithm for extracting quantitative association rules was developed in this research. Accurate and interpretable rules result from the integration of the multiple objectives GA with the multiple objective PSO algorithms, which redresses the balance in the exploitation and exploration tasks. The useful and appropriate rules and the most suitable numerical intervals are discovered by proposing a multi-criteria method in which there is no need to discretize numerical values and to determine threshold values of minimum support and confidence. Different criteria are used to determine appropriate rules. In this algorithm, the selected rules are extracted based on confidence, interestingness and comprehensibility. The results gained over five real-world datasets evidence the effectiveness of the proposed method. By hybridization of the GA and the PSO algorithm, the proposed approach has achieved considerable improvements compared with the basic algorithms in the criteria of the number of extracted rules from dataset, high confidence measure and support percentage.

A Genetic Algorithm based framework for mining quantitative association rules without specifying minimum support and minimum confidence

Discovering association rules is a useful and common technique for data mining in which relations and co-dependencies between datasets are shown. One of the most important challenges of data mining is to discover the rules of continuous numerical datasets. Furthermore, another restriction imposed by algorithms in this area is the need to determine the minimum threshold for the support and confidence criteria. In this paper a multi-objective algorithm for mining quantitative association rules is proposed. The procedure is based on the Genetic Algorithm, and there is no need there is no need to determine the extent of the threshold for the support and confidence criteria. By proposing a multi-criteria method, the useful and attractive rules and the most suitable numerical intervals are discovered, without the need to discrete numerical values and the determination of the minimum support threshold and minimum confidence threshold. Different criteria are used to determine appropriate rules. In this algorithm, the selected rules are extracted based on confidence, interestingness, and cosine2. The results obtained from real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The algorithm is used to examine three datasets and the results show the performance superiority of the proposed algorithm compared to similar algorithms.

PPQAR: Parallel PSO for quantitative association rule mining

Mining quantitative association rules is one of the most important tasks in data mining and exists in many real-world problems. Many researches have proved that particle swarm optimization(PSO) algorithm is suitable for quantitative association rule mining (ARM) and there are many successful cases in different fields. However, the method becomes inefficient even unavailable on huge datasets. This paper proposes a parallel PSO for quantitative association rule mining(PPQAR). The parallel algorithm designs two methods, particle-oriented and data-oriented parallelization, to fit different application scenarios. Experiments were conducted to evaluate these two methods. Results show that particle-oriented parallelization has a higher speedup, and data-oriented method is more general on large datasets.

Machine Learning Based Quantitative Association Rule Mining Method for Evaluating Cellular Network Performance

Cellular network performance is often evaluated by key performance indicator (KPI) and key quality indicator (KQI). The association between KQI and KPI is the most critical step to optimize the performance of cellular network. Traditional association methods between KPI and KQI are based on the end-to-end evaluation. However, these methods require professional engineers to evaluate cellular network performance, and the man-manned evaluation is often inaccurate and labor-consuming, which cannot find out the caused factor of deterioration networks. In order to solve the problem, we propose a machine learning based quantitative association rule mining (QARM) method called SWP-RF, which consists of sliding-window partitioning (SWP) and random forest (RF), to associate KPI with KQI. Specifically, we first use SWP to discretize continuous attributes into boolean values, which is adopted to mine its association rules. The warning intervals and the warning points is obtained by SWP. Next, we use RF feature importance to measure the association between KPI and KQI. The priority of the association strength between all KPIs and each KQI can be obtained by RF. Finally, we select the warning points and the association strength priority as optimal output solution. Experiments are conducted over the actual data from telecom operators and the results confirm the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method.