Mining Fuzzy Multiple-Level Association Rules from Quantitative Data

Machine-learning and data-mining techniques have been developed to turn data into useful task-oriented knowledge. Most algorithms for mining association rules identify relationships among transactions using binary values and find rules at a single-concept level. Transactions with quantitative values and items with hierarchical relationships are, however, commonly seen in real-world applications. This paper proposes a fuzzy multiple-level mining algorithm for extracting knowledge implicit in transactions stored as quantitative values. The proposed algorithm adopts a top-down progressively deepening approach to finding large itemsets. It integrates fuzzy-set concepts, data-mining technologies and multiple-level taxonomy to find fuzzy association rules from transaction data sets. Each item uses only the linguistic term with the maximum cardinality in later mining processes, thus making the number of fuzzy regions to be processed the same as the number of original items. The algorithm therefore focuses on the most important linguistic terms for reduced time complexity.     

Mining fuzzy temporal association rules by item lifespans

Data mining is the process of extracting desirable knowledge or interesting patterns from existing databases for specific purposes. In real-world applications, transactions may contain quantitative values and each item may have a lifespan from a temporal database. In this paper, we thus propose a data mining algorithm for deriving fuzzy temporal association rules. It first transforms each quantitative value into a fuzzy set using the given membership functions. Meanwhile, item lifespans are collected and recorded in a temporal information table through a transformation process. The algorithm then calculates the scalar cardinality of each linguistic term of each item. A mining process based on fuzzy counts and item lifespans is then performed to find fuzzy temporal association rules. Experiments are finally performed on two simulation datasets and the foodmart dataset to show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed approach.     

Genetic-Fuzzy Data Mining With Divide-and-Conquer Strategy

Data mining is most commonly used in attempts to induce association rules from transaction data. Most previous studies focused on binary-valued transaction data. Transaction data in real-world applications, however, usually consist of quantitative values. This paper, thus, proposes a fuzzy data-mining algorithm for extracting both association rules and membership functions from quantitative transactions. A genetic algorithm (GA)-based framework for finding membership functions suitable for mining problems is proposed. The fitness of each set of membership functions is evaluated by the fuzzy-supports of the linguistic terms in the large 1-itemsets and by the suitability of the derived membership functions. The evaluation by the fuzzy supports of large 1-itemsets is much faster than that when considering all itemsets or interesting association rules. It can also help divide-and-conquer the derivation process of the membership functions for different items. The proposed GA framework, thus, maintains multiple populations, each for one item's membership functions. The final best sets of membership functions in all the populations are then gathered together to be used for mining fuzzy association rules. Experiments are conducted to analyze different fitness functions and set different fitness functions and setting different supports and confidences. Experiments are also conducted to compare the proposed algorithm, the one with uniform fuzzy partition, and the existing one without divide-and-conquer, with results validating the performance of the proposed algorithm.     

Actionable high-coherent-utility fuzzy itemset mining

Many fuzzy data mining approaches have been proposed for finding fuzzy association rules with the predefined minimum support from quantitative transaction databases. Since each item has its own utility, utility itemset mining has become increasingly important. However, common problems with existing approaches are that an appropriate minimum support is difficult to determine and that the derived rules usually expose common-sense knowledge, which may not be interesting from a business point of view. This study thus proposes an algorithm for mining high-coherent-utility fuzzy itemsets to overcome problems with the properties of propositional logic. Quantitative transactions are first transformed into fuzzy sets. Then, the utility of each fuzzy itemset is calculated according to the given external utility table. If the value is larger than or equal to the minimum utility ratio, the itemset is considered as a high-utility fuzzy itemset. Finally, contingency tables are calculated and used for checking whether a high-utility fuzzy itemset satisfies four criteria. If so, it is a high-coherent-utility fuzzy itemset. Experiments on the foodmart and simulated datasets are made to show that the derived itemsets by the proposed algorithm not only can reach better profit than selling them separately, but also can provide fewer but more useful utility itemsets for decision-makers.     

Mining fuzzy sequential patterns from quantitative transactions

Many researchers in database and machine learning fields are primarily interested in data mining because it offers opportunities to discover useful information and important relevant patterns in large databases. Most previous studies have shown how binary valued transaction data may be handled. Transaction data in real-world applications usually consist of quantitative values, so designing a sophisticated data-mining algorithm able to deal with various types of data presents a challenge to workers in this research field. In the past, we proposed a fuzzy data-mining algorithm to find association rules. Since sequential patterns are also very important for real-world applications, this paper thus focuses on finding fuzzy sequential patterns from quantitative data. A new mining algorithm is proposed, which integrates the fuzzy-set concepts and the AprioriAll algorithm. It first transforms quantitative values in transactions into linguistic terms, then filters them to find sequential patterns by modifying the AprioriAll mining algorithm. Each quantitative item uses only the linguistic term with the maximum cardinality in later mining processes, thus making the number of fuzzy regions to be processed the same as the number of the original items. The patterns mined out thus exhibit the sequential quantitative regularity in databases and can be used to provide some suggestions to appropriate supervisors.     

基于多最小支持度的多层模糊关联规则挖掘

为了在事务数据库中发现关联规则,在现实挖掘应用中,经常采用不同的标准去判断不同项目的重要性,管理项目之间的分类关系和处理定量数据集这3个方法去处理问题,因此提出一个在定量事务数据库中采用多最小支持度,在项目集中获取隐含知识的多层模糊关联规则挖掘算法。该挖掘算法使用两种支持度约束和至上而下逐步细化的方法推导出频繁项集,同时可以发现交叉层次的模糊关联规则。通过实例证明了该挖掘算法在多最小支持度约束下推导出的多层模糊关联规则是易于理解和有意义的,具有很好的效率和伸缩性。     

Mining association rules from quantitative data

Data-mining is the process of extracting desirable knowledge or interesting patterns from existing databases for specific purposes. Most conventional data-mining algorithms identify the relationships among transactions using binary values, however, transactions with quantitative values are commonly seen in real-world applications. This paper thus proposes a new data-mining algorithm for extracting interesting knowledge from transactions stored as quantitative values. The proposed algorithm integrates fuzzy set concepts and the apriori mining algorithm to find interesting fuzzy association rules in given transaction data sets. Experiments with student grades at I-Shou University were also made to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm.     

Utilizing Genetic Algorithms to Optimize Membership Functions for Fuzzy Weighted Association Rules Mining

It is not an easy task to know a priori the most appropriate fuzzy sets that cover the domains of quantitative attributes for fuzzy association rules mining. In general, it is unrealistic that experts can always provide such sets. And finding the most appropriate fuzzy sets becomes a more complex problem when items are not considered to have equal importance and the support and confidence parameters required for the association rules mining process are specified as linguistic terms. Existing clustering based automated methods are not satisfactory because they do not consider the optimization of the discovered membership functions. In order to tackle this problem, we propose Genetic Algorithms (GAs) based clustering method, which dynamically adjusts the fuzzy sets to provide maximum profit based on user specified linguistic minimum support and confidence terms. This is achieved by tuning the base values of the membership functions for each quantitative attribute with respect to two different evaluation functions maximizing the number of large itemsets and the average of the confidence intervals of the generated rules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in this direction. Experiments conducted on 100 K transactions from the adult database of United States census in year 2000 demonstrate that the proposed clustering method exhibits good performance in terms of the number of produced large itemsets and interesting association rules.     

A CMFFP-tree algorithm to mine complete multiple fuzzy frequent itemsets

In the past, many algorithms were proposed to adopt fuzzy-set theory for discovering fuzzy association rules from quantitative databases. The fuzzy frequent pattern (FFP)-tree and the compressed fuzzy frequent pattern (CFFP)-tree algorithms were respectively proposed to mine the incomplete fuzzy frequent itemsets from the tree-based structures. In the past, multiple fuzzy frequent pattern (MFFP)-tree algorithm was proposed to keep more linguistic terms for mining fuzzy frequent itemsets. Since the MFFP-tree algorithm inherits the property of the FFP-tree algorithm, numerous tree nodes are thus required to build the MFFP-tree structure for mining the desired multiple fuzzy frequent itemsets. In this paper, the compressed multiple fuzzy frequent pattern (CMFFP)-tree algorithm is designed to keep not only the linguistic term with maximum membership value but also the other frequent linguistic terms for mining the completely fuzzy frequent itemsets. In the designed CMFFP-tree algorithm, the multiple frequent linguistic terms are sorted in descending order of their occurrence frequencies to build the CMFFP-tree structure. The construction process is the same as the CFFP-tree algorithm except more information are kept for later mining process to discover the completely fuzzy frequent itemsets. Each node in the CMFFP-tree uses the additional array to keep the membership values of its prefix path by intersection operation. A CMFFP-mine algorithm is also designed to efficiently mine the multiple fuzzy frequent itemsets from the developed CMFFP-tree structure. Experiments are then conducted to show the performance of the proposed CMFFP-tree algorithm in terms of execution time and the number of tree nodes, compared to those of the MFFP-tree and CFFP-tree algorithms.     

A genetic-fuzzy mining approach for items with multiple minimum supports

Data mining is the process of extracting desirable knowledge or interesting patterns from existing databases for specific purposes. Mining association rules from transaction data is most commonly seen among the mining techniques. Most of the previous mining approaches set a single minimum support threshold for all the items and identify the relationships among transactions using binary values. In the past, we proposed a genetic-fuzzy data-mining algorithm for extracting both association rules and membership functions from quantitative transactions under a single minimum support. In real applications, different items may have different criteria to judge their importance. In this paper, we thus propose an algorithm which combines clustering, fuzzy and genetic concepts for extracting reasonable multiple minimum support values, membership functions and fuzzy association rules from quantitative transactions. It first uses the k-means clustering approach to gather similar items into groups. All items in the same cluster are considered to have similar characteristics and are assigned similar values for initializing a better population. Each chromosome is then evaluated by the criteria of requirement satisfaction and suitability of membership functions to estimate its fitness value. Experimental results also show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed approach.     

Genetic-fuzzy mining with multiple minimum supports based on fuzzy clustering

Data mining is the process of extracting desirable knowledge or interesting patterns from existing databases for specific purposes. Most of the previous approaches set a single minimum support threshold for all the items and identify the relationships among transactions using binary values. In real applications, different items may have different criteria to judge their importance. In the past, we proposed an algorithm for extracting appropriate multiple minimum support values, membership functions and fuzzy association rules from quantitative transactions. It used requirement satisfaction and suitability of membership functions to evaluate fitness values of chromosomes. The calculation for requirement satisfaction might take a lot of time, especially when the database to be scanned could not be totally fed into main memory. In this paper, an enhanced approach, called the fuzzy cluster-based genetic-fuzzy mining approach for items with multiple minimum supports (FCGFMMS), is thus proposed to speed up the evaluation process and keep nearly the same quality of solutions as the previous one. It divides the chromosomes in a population into several clusters by the fuzzy k-means clustering approach and evaluates each individual according to both their cluster and their own information. Experimental results also show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed approach.     

Mining high utility itemsets by dynamically pruning the tree structure

Mining high utility itemsets is one of the most important research issues in data mining owing to its ability to consider nonbinary frequency values of items in transactions and different profit values for each item. Mining such itemsets from a transaction database involves finding those itemsets with utility above a user-specified threshold. In this paper, we propose an efficient concurrent algorithm, called CHUI-Mine (Concurrent High Utility Itemsets Mine), for mining high utility itemsets by dynamically pruning the tree structure. A tree structure, called the CHUI-Tree, is introduced to capture the important utility information of the candidate itemsets. By recording changes in support counts of candidate high utility items during the tree construction process, we implement dynamic CHUI-Tree pruning, and discuss the rationality thereof. The CHUI-Mine algorithm makes use of a concurrent strategy, enabling the simultaneous construction of a CHUI-Tree and the discovery of high utility itemsets. Our algorithm reduces the problem of huge memory usage for tree construction and traversal in tree-based algorithms for mining high utility itemsets. Extensive experimental results show that the CHUI-Mine algorithm is both efficient and scalable.     

Fuzzy data mining for time-series data

Time series analysis has always been an important and interesting research field due to its frequent appearance in different applications. In the past, many approaches based on regression, neural networks and other mathematical models were proposed to analyze the time series. In this paper, we attempt to use the data mining technique to analyze time series. Many previous studies on data mining have focused on handling binary-valued data. Time series data, however, are usually quantitative values. We thus extend our previous fuzzy mining approach for handling time-series data to find linguistic association rules. The proposed approach first uses a sliding window to generate continues subsequences from a given time series and then analyzes the fuzzy itemsets from these subsequences. Appropriate post-processing is then performed to remove redundant patterns. Experiments are also made to show the performance of the proposed mining algorithm. Since the final results are represented by linguistic rules, they will be friendlier to human than quantitative representation.     

Decentralized Association Rule Mining on Web Using Rough Set Theory

A central part of many algorithms for mining association rules in large data sets is a procedure that is to find so called frequent itemsets. The frequent itemsets are very large due to transactions data increasing. This paper proposes a new approach to find frequent itemsets employing rough set theory that can extract association rules for each homogenou.s cluster of transaction data records and relationships between different clusters. This paper conducts an algorithm to reduce a large number of itemsets to find valid association rules.     

An improved approach to find membership functions and multiple minimum supports in fuzzy data mining

Fuzzy mining approaches have recently been discussed for deriving fuzzy knowledge. Since items may have their own characteristics, different minimum supports and membership functions may be specified for different items. In the past, we proposed a genetic-fuzzy data-mining algorithm for extracting minimum supports and membership functions for items from quantitative transactions. In that paper, minimum supports and membership functions of all items are encoded in a chromosome such that it may be not easy to converge. In this paper, an enhanced approach is proposed, which processes the items in a divide-and-conquer strategy. The approach is called divide-and-conquer genetic-fuzzy mining algorithm for items with Multiple Minimum Supports (DGFMMS), and is designed for finding minimum supports, membership functions, and fuzzy association rules. Possible solutions are evaluated by their requirement satisfaction divided by their suitability of derived membership functions. The proposed GA framework maintains multiple populations, each for one item’s minimum support and membership functions. The final best minimum supports and membership functions in all the populations are then gathered together to be used for mining fuzzy association rules. Experimental results also show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

A GA-based Fuzzy Mining Approach to Achieve a Trade-off Between Number of Rules and Suitability of Membership Functions

Data mining is most commonly used in attempts to induce association rules from transaction data. Transactions in real-world applications, however, usually consist of quantitative values. This paper thus proposes a fuzzy data-mining algorithm for extracting both association rules and membership functions from quantitative transactions. We present a GA-based framework for finding membership functions suitable for mining problems and then use the final best set of membership functions to mine fuzzy association rules. The fitness of each chromosome is evaluated by the number of large 1-itemsets generated from part of the previously proposed fuzzy mining algorithm and by the suitability of the membership functions. Experimental results also show the effectiveness of the framework.     

Efficient updating of discovered high-utility itemsets for transaction deletion in dynamic databases

Most algorithms related to association rule mining are designed to discover frequent itemsets from a binary database. Other factors such as profit, cost, or quantity are not concerned in binary databases. Utility mining was thus proposed to measure the utility values of purchased items for finding high-utility itemsets from a static database. In real-world applications, transactions are changed whether insertion or deletion in a dynamic database. An existing maintenance approach for handling high-utility itemsets in dynamic databases with transaction deletion must rescan the database when necessary. In this paper, an efficient algorithm, called PRE-HUI-DEL, for updating high-utility itemsets based on the pre-large concept for transaction deletion is proposed. The pre-large concept is used to partition transaction-weighted utilization itemsets into three sets with nine cases according to whether they have large (high), pre-large, or small transaction-weighted utilization in the original database and in the deleted transactions. Specific procedures are then applied to each case for maintaining and updating the discovered high-utility itemsets. Experimental results show that the proposed PRE-HUI-DEL algorithm outperforms a batch two-phase algorithm and a FUP2-based algorithm in maintaining high-utility itemsets.     

项约束频繁项集挖掘的新方法

项约束频繁项集挖掘是项约束关联规则挖掘的关键步骤。对项约束频繁项集挖掘的内涵进行讨论,认为一个项集X本身满足项约束条件B是不够的,数据库中支持X的全部事务均满足B才能称“项集X满足条件B”。据此,将Direct算法改进为Direct*,在Direct*中负项被作为一个独立的项来看待。项约束是简洁性约束,但目前已有的算法没有充分利用其简洁性,提出利用项约束简洁性的MSEB算法。实验表明：对稠密数据库,MSEB的效率较高,并且Direct*和MSEB两个算法均是正确的。     

Incrementally mining high utility patterns based on pre-large concept

In traditional association rule mining, most algorithms are designed to discover frequent itemsets from a binary database. Utility mining was thus proposed to measure the utility values of purchased items for revealing high utility itemsets from a quantitative database. In the past, a two-phase high utility mining algorithm was thus proposed for efficiently discovering high utility itemsets from a quantitative database. In dynamic data mining, transactions may be inserted, deleted, or modified from a database. In this case, a batch mining procedure must rescan the whole updated database to maintain the up-to-date information. Designing an efficient approach for handling dynamic databases is thus a critical research issue in utility mining. In this paper, an incremental mining algorithm is proposed for efficiently maintaining discovered high utility itemsets based on pre-large concepts. Itemsets are first partitioned into three parts according to whether they have large (high), pre-large, or small transaction-weighted utilization in the original database and in inserted transactions. Individual procedures are then executed for each part. Experimental results show that the proposed incremental high utility mining algorithm outperforms existing algorithms.     

一种挖掘加权频繁项集的改进算法

分析了New-Apriori和MWFI（Mining Weighted Frequent Itemsets）算法之不足,提出了一种挖掘加权频繁项集的New-MWFI算法。该算法按属性的权值对事务进行分类,并依次求出每个类别内的加权频繁项集。由于每个类别内的频繁项集满足Apriori性质,因而可以利用Apriori算法或其他改进算法进行挖掘,从而克服了原来算法的不合理和效率低下的缺陷。实验表明该算法能更有效地从数据集中挖掘出加权频繁项集。