Traditional Association Rule Mining Research Articles

COVID-19 Data Analysis with a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm for Causal Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining plays a crucial role in the medical area in discovering interesting relationships among the attributes of a data set. Traditional association rule mining algorithms such as Apriori, FP growth, or Eclat require considerable computational resources and generate large volumes of rules. Moreover, these techniques depend on user-defined thresholds which can inadvertently cause the algorithm to omit some interesting rules. In order to solve such challenges, we propose an evolutionary multi-objective algorithm based on NSGA-II to guide the mining process in a data set composed of 15.5 million records with official data describing the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. We tested different scenarios optimizing classical and causal estimation measures in four waves, defined as the periods of time where the number of people with COVID-19 increased. The proposed contributions generate, recombine, and evaluate patterns, focusing on recovering promising high-quality rules with actionable cause–effect relationships among the attributes to identify which groups are more susceptible to disease or what combinations of conditions are necessary to receive certain types of medical care.

A Semantic Approach for Extracting the Medical Association Rules

Healthcare data analytics has indispensable responsibility in advancing remedial decision-making and healthcare practices. In this paper, a novel semantic approach is introduced for extracting medical association rules, designed at discovering expressive interactions between medical things. Our methodology incorporates medical ontologies, and improved semantic measures to boost the accuracy and interpretability of the obtained rules. Our method delivers clinically pertinent information into patient perspectives on mental health, the accessibility of mental health resources, and the influence of physical health on mental well-being by mapping medical notions to ontological items and examining semantic relationships. Experimental validation on a case study of mental health dataset proves the dominance of our method over traditional association rule mining methods. The proposed semantic method presents valuable support to healthcare data analysis and decision-making processes.

A Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization for Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining (ARM) is one of the core techniques of data mining to discover potentially valuable association relationships from mixed datasets. In the current research, various heuristic algorithms have been introduced into ARM to address the high computation time of traditional ARM. Although a more detailed review of the heuristic algorithms based on ARM is available, this paper differs from the existing reviews in that we expected it to provide a more comprehensive and multi-faceted survey of emerging research, which could provide a reference for researchers in the field to help them understand the state-of-the-art PSO-based ARM algorithms. In this paper, we review the existing research results. Heuristic algorithms for ARM were divided into three main groups, including biologically inspired, physically inspired, and other algorithms. Additionally, different types of ARM and their evaluation metrics are described in this paper, and the current status of the improvement in PSO algorithms is discussed in stages, including swarm initialization, algorithm parameter optimization, optimal particle update, and velocity and position updates. Furthermore, we discuss the applications of PSO-based ARM algorithms and propose further research directions by exploring the existing problems.

Fuzzy association rule mining approach to identify e-commerce product association considering sales amount

Online stores assist customers in buying the desired products online. Great competition in the e-commerce sector necessitates technology development. Many e-commerce systems not only present products but also offer similar products to increase online customer interest. Due to high product variety, analyzing products sold together similar to a recommendation system is a must. This study methodologically improves the traditional association rule mining (ARM) method by adding fuzzy set theory. Besides, it extends the ARM by considering not only items sold but also sales amounts. Fuzzy association rule mining (FARM) with the Apriori algorithm can catch the customers’ choice from historical transaction data. It discovers fuzzy association rules from an e-commerce company to display similar products to customers according to their needs in amount. The experimental result shows that the proposed FARM approach produces much information about e-commerce sales for decision-makers. Furthermore, the FARM method eliminates some traditional rules considering their sales amount and can produce some rules different from ARM.

An Improved Recognition Method of Weighted Rules and Its Application in Recommendation Algorithm

The method proposed in this paper mainly uses the difference of the importance of items in the database to improve the problem of mining a large number of redundant and useless rules by traditional association rules mining algorithm. The method has made great improvement in three aspects of association rule design, which are effective length recognition of recommendation rule, weighted association rule mining combined with frequency analysis and time constraint application. The weighted temporal association rules mined by the effective frequency length weighted association rules mining algorithm can improve the accuracy of recommendation, and the accuracy of recommendation prediction is increased from 62% to 69%. The purpose of this algorithm is to mine hidden high value rules, and optimize the algorithm considering the time complexity of algorithm execution while ensuring the accuracy of the algorithm.

Review of Association Mining Methods for the Extraction of Rules Based on the Frequency and Utility Factors

Association rule defines the relationship among the items and discovers the frequent items using a support-confidence framework. This framework establishes user-interested or strong association rules with two thresholds (i.e., minimum support and minimum confidence). Traditional association rule mining methods (i.e., apriori and frequent pattern growth [FP-growth]) are widely used for discovering of frequent itemsets, and limitation of these methods is that they are not considering the key factors of the items such as profit, quantity, or cost of items during the mining process. Applications like e-commerce, marketing, healthcare, and web recommendations, etc. consist of items with their utility or profit. Such cases, utility-based itemsets mining methods, are playing a vital role in the generation of effective association rules and are also useful in the mining of high utility itemsets. This paper presents the survey on high-utility itemsets mining methods and discusses the observation study of existing methods with their experimental study using benchmarked datasets.

Mining predicate rules without minimum support threshold

Association rule mining (ARM) is used for discovering frequent itemsets for interesting relationships of associative and correlative behaviors within the data. This gives new insights of great value, both commercial and academic. The traditional ARM techniques discover interesting association rules based on a predefined minimum support threshold. However, there is no known standard of an exact definition of minimum support and providing an inappropriate minimum support value may result in missing important rules. In addition, most of the rules discovered by these traditional ARM techniques refer to already known knowledge. To address these limitations of the minimum support threshold in ARM techniques, this study proposes an algorithm to mine interesting association rules without minimum support using predicate logic and a property of a proposed interestingness measure (g measure). The algorithm scans the database and uses g measure’s property to search for interesting combinations. The selected combinations are mapped to pseudo-implications and inference rules of logic are used on the pseudo-implications to produce and validate the predicate rules. Experimental results of the proposed technique show better performance against state-of-the-art classification techniques, and reliable predicate rules are discovered based on the reliability differences of the presence and absence of the rule’s consequence.

A Survey of incremental high-utility pattern mining based on storage structure

Traditional association rule mining has been widely studied, but this is not applicable to practical applications that must consider factors such as the unit profit of the item and the purchase quantity. High-utility itemset mining (HUIM) aims to find high-utility patterns by considering the number of items purchased and the unit profit. However, most high-utility itemset mining algorithms are designed for static databases. In real-world applications (such as market analysis and business decisions), databases are usually updated by inserting new data dynamically. Some researchers have proposed algorithms for finding high-utility itemsets in dynamically updated databases. Different from the batch processing algorithms that always process the databases from scratch, the incremental HUIM algorithms update and output high-utility itemsets in an incremental manner, thereby reducing the cost of finding high-utility itemsets. This paper provides the latest research on incremental high-utility itemset mining algorithms, including methods of storing itemsets and utilities based on tree, list, array and hash set storage structures. It also points out several important derivative algorithms and research challenges for incremental high-utility itemset mining.

CrimeScape: Analysis of socio-spatial associations of urban residential motor vehicle theft

This paper focuses on advancing the traditional association rule mining (ARM) approach to capture the rich, multidimensional and multiscalar context that is anticipated to be associated with residential Motor Vehicle Theft (MVT) across urban environments. We tackle the challenge to materialize complex social and spatial components in the mining process and present a novel interactive visualization based on social network analysis of rules and associations to facilitate the analysis of mined rules. The spatial ARM (SARM) findings successfully identify many socio-spatial associations to MVT prevalence and establish their relative influence on crime outcome in a case study. Also, the analysis provides unique insights to understand the interactive relationships between neighborhood characteristics and environmental features to both high and low MVT and underscores the importance of spatial properties of spillover and neighborhood effects on urban residential MVT prevalence. This work follows the tradition of inductive and abductive learning and presents a promising analysis framework using data mining which can be applied to different applications in social sciences.

TSARM-UDP: An Efficient Time Series Association Rules Mining Algorithm Based on Up-to-Date Patterns.

In many industrial domains, there is a significant interest in obtaining temporal relationships among multiple variables in time-series data, given that such relationships play an auxiliary role in decision making. However, when transactions occur frequently only for a period of time, it is difficult for a traditional time-series association rules mining algorithm (TSARM) to identify this kind of relationship. In this paper, we propose a new TSARM framework and a novel algorithm named TSARM-UDP. A TSARM mining framework is used to mine time-series association rules (TSARs) and an up-to-date pattern (UDP) is applied to discover rare patterns that only appear in a period of time. Based on the up-to-date pattern mining, the proposed TSAR-UDP method could extract temporal relationship rules with better generality. The rules can be widely used in the process industry, the stock market, etc. Experiments are then performed on the public stock data and real blast furnace data to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. We compare our algorithm with three state-of-the-art algorithms, and the experimental results show that our algorithm can provide greater efficiency and interpretability in TSARs and that it has good prospects.

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

Research on Application of Improved Association Rules Mining Algorithm in Personalized Recommendation

Traditional association rule mining does not consider the importance of each item, so the actual process lacks certain pertinence. Based on the New-Apriori algorithm and the Fp-growth algorithm idea, this paper proposes an improved association rule algorithm based on Fp-tree, Constructs the general process of personalized recommendation of association rules. And uses the Web log file to use the frequency of web pages being selected by users as the weight value, and realizes the algorithm of the personalized recommendation system. The experimental results show that the algorithm has high accuracy and effectiveness.

A Context-free Grammar based Association Rule Mining Technique for Network Dataset

Among various data mining concepts like prediction, clustering, classification, association and outlier discovery, association is a useful technique to extract the interesting relations among data items effectively. Association technique is applied in a number of applications like marketing, education, chemical, bioinformatics, computational linguistics and etc. The important purpose of association is to provide useful information of buying preferences of customers in supermarket in order to increase the sales opportunity, which is called as market- basket analysis. Till now there are many algorithms were developed, but the usage of formal grammars in association rule mining (ARM) is a latest technique to mine required data by means of grammars. In this paper ARM is performed using Context –free Grammar (CFG) – (ARM – Grammar) and the experiments are conducted on MATLAB 2017 software using network dataset, KDDCUP’99. Experimental outcomes prove that the proposed ARM – Grammar is effective than the traditional ARM approach.

Efficient Algorithms for Mining the Concise and Lossless Representation of High Utility Itemsets

Data mining is the process of extracting new, possibly useful information from vast data bases that is not straightforward. Market basket analysis, a kind of data mining used in retail research, is used to analyse client transactions. The association between the things that occur in transactions more frequently was the focus of earlier data mining techniques. They don't take an item's significance or utility into account while often mining an itemset. Utility mining is a new field that has emerged as a result of the limits of common mining goods. When mining, the profitability or utility of an object is taken into account. In a transaction, an item's utility refers to its significance or financial gain. Finding the item set with utility values over the specified threshold is the main goal of mining high utility goods. We give a literature review on several mining methods in this work. The support-confidence framework, used in traditional association rule mining, gives users an objective way to quantify the rules that are important to them. Despite several research being done, the mining operation may perform worse with regard to of processing speed as well as memory. efficiency when consumers are presented with too many high utility itemsets by existing approaches. In this research, the system proposes a unique framework for mining closed high utility itemsets that acts as a lossless yet compact representation of high utility itemsets.

Linguistic frequent pattern mining using a compressed structure

Traditional association-rule mining (ARM) considers only the frequency of items in a binary database, which provides insufficient knowledge for making efficient decisions and strategies. The mining of useful information from quantitative databases is not a trivial task compared to conventional algorithms in ARM. Fuzzy-set theory was invented to represent a more valuable form of knowledge for human reasoning, which can also be applied and utilized for quantitative databases. Many approaches have adopted fuzzy-set theory to transform the quantitative value into linguistic terms with its corresponding degree based on defined membership functions for the discovery of FFIs, also known as fuzzy frequent itemsets. Only linguistic terms with maximal scalar cardinality are considered in traditional fuzzy frequent itemset mining, but the uncertainty factor is not involved in past approaches. In this paper, an efficient fuzzy mining (EFM) algorithm is presented to quickly discover multiple FFIs from quantitative databases under type-2 fuzzy-set theory. A compressed fuzzy-list (CFL)-structure is developed to maintain complete information for rule generation. Two pruning techniques are developed for reducing the search space and speeding up the mining process. Several experiments are carried out to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the designed approach in terms of runtime, the number of examined nodes, memory usage, and scalability under different minimum support thresholds and different linguistic terms used in the membership functions.

Association rules mining between service demands and remanufacturing services

AbstractThe potential relationship between service demands and remanufacturing services (RMS) is essential to make the decision of a RMS plan accurately and improve the efficiency and benefit. In the traditional association rule mining methods, a large number of candidate sets affect the mining efficiency, and the results are not easy for customers to understand. Therefore, a mining method based on binary particle swarm optimization ant colony algorithm to discover service demands and remanufacture services association rules is proposed. This method preprocesses the RMS records, converts them into a binary matrix, and uses the improved ant colony algorithm to mine the maximum frequent itemset. Because the particle swarm algorithm determines the initial pheromone concentration of the ant colony, it avoids the blindness of the ant colony, effectively enhances the searchability of the algorithm, and makes association rule mining faster and more accurate. Finally, a set of historical RMS record data of straightening machine is used to test the validity and feasibility of this method by extracting valid association rules to guide the design of RMS scheme for straightening machine parts.

Fast Top-K association rule mining using rule generation property pruning

Traditional association rule mining algorithms can have a long runtime, high memory consumption, and generate a huge number of rules. Browsing through numerous rules and adjusting parameters to find just enough rules is a tedious task for users, who are often only interested in finding the strongest rules. Hence, many recent studies have focused on mining the top-k most frequent association rules that have a minimum confidence so as to limit the number of rules by ranking them by frequency. Though this redefined task has many applications, the performance of current algorithms remains an issue. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel algorithm named FTARM (Fast Top-K Association Rule Miner) to efficiently find the set of top-k association rules using a novel technique called Rule Generation Property Pruning (RGPP). This technique reduces the search space by analyzing the internal relationships between items of the database to be mined and the parameters set by users. Furthermore, a novel candidate pruning property is used by this technique to speed up the mining process. FTARM’s efficiency was evaluated on various public benchmark datasets. A substantial reduction of the association rule mining time and memory usage was observed, and that FTARM has good scalability, which can benefit to many applications.

Distributed elephant herding optimization for grid-based privacy association rule mining

PurposeAssociation rule mining generates the patterns and correlations from the database, which requires large scanning time, and the cost of computation associated with the generation of the rules is quite high. On the other hand, the candidate rules generated using the traditional association rules mining face a huge challenge in terms of time and space, and the process is lengthy. In order to tackle the issues of the existing methods and to render the privacy rules, the paper proposes the grid-based privacy association rule mining.Design/methodology/approachThe primary intention of the research is to design and develop a distributed elephant herding optimization (EHO) for grid-based privacy association rule mining from the database. The proposed method of rule generation is processed as two steps: in the first step, the rules are generated using apriori algorithm, which is the effective association rule mining algorithm. In general, the extraction of the association rules from the input database is based on confidence and support that is replaced with new terms, such as probability-based confidence and holo-entropy. Thus, in the proposed model, the extraction of the association rules is based on probability-based confidence and holo-entropy. In the second step, the generated rules are given to the grid-based privacy rule mining, which produces privacy-dependent rules based on a novel optimization algorithm and grid-based fitness. The novel optimization algorithm is developed by integrating the distributed concept in EHO algorithm.FindingsThe experimentation of the method using the databases taken from the Frequent Itemset Mining Dataset Repository to prove the effectiveness of the distributed grid-based privacy association rule mining includes the retail, chess, T10I4D100K and T40I10D100K databases. The proposed method outperformed the existing methods through offering a higher degree of privacy and utility, and moreover, it is noted that the distributed nature of the association rule mining facilitates the parallel processing and generates the privacy rules without much computational burden. The rate of hiding capacity, the rate of information preservation and rate of the false rules generated for the proposed method are found to be 0.4468, 0.4488 and 0.0654, respectively, which is better compared with the existing rule mining methods.Originality/valueData mining is performed in a distributed manner through the grids that subdivide the input data, and the rules are framed using the apriori-based association mining, which is the modification of the standard apriori with the holo-entropy and probability-based confidence replacing the support and confidence in the standard apriori algorithm. The mined rules do not assure the privacy, and hence, the grid-based privacy rules are employed that utilize the adaptive elephant herding optimization (AEHO) for generating the privacy rules. The AEHO inherits the adaptive nature in the standard EHO, which renders the global optimal solution.

A survey of evolutionary computation for association rule mining

Association Rule Mining (ARM) is a significant task for discovering frequent patterns in data mining. It has achieved great success in a plethora of applications such as market basket, computer networks, recommendation systems, and healthcare. In the past few years, evolutionary computation-based ARM has emerged as one of the most popular research areas for addressing the high computation time of traditional ARM. Although numerous papers have been published, there is no comprehensive analysis of existing evolutionary ARM methodologies. In this paper, we review emerging research of evolutionary computation for ARM. We discuss the applications on evolutionary computations for different types of ARM approaches including numerical rules, fuzzy rules, high-utility itemsets, class association rules, and rare association rules. Evolutionary ARM algorithms were classified into four main groups in terms of the evolutionary approach, including evolution-based, swarm intelligence-based, physics-inspired, and hybrid approaches. Furthermore, we discuss the remaining challenges of evolutionary ARM and discuss its applications and future topics.

Determining profitable products in the retail market with consideration of cash limitation and exhibition periods

In the selection of profitable products, consumer preferences and retailer constraints in products supply must be considered. When data mining algorithms are used to discover the consumer's preferences from transaction database, the results may be biased, if the exhibition period of the products has not be considered. In this study a new method is proposed to adjust the support and confidence coefficients of traditional association rule mining algorithms such as Apriori or FP-growth taking into consideration of common exhibition periods. On the supply side, the retailer may have some limitations in terms of buying and supplying products in the store. In the most recent researches, only the shelf space constraint has been considered. In this study, financing as an important constraint in the retail market and the opportunity cost of money are imported in the selection of profitable products.The researcher's experiment on real world data shows that the number of frequent itemsets increases significantly when products exhibition periods are taken into consideration. In this case, if the retailer considers the opportunity cost of money as 1%, the profitable set composition will be changed by 10%. Also, when the opportunity cost is 1% and the retailer faces cash limitation, the number of products is reduced by 21% in the most profitable set, whereas the new set composition is 29.4% different from the base set.