Mining interesting association rules from customer databases and transaction databases

In this paper, we examine a new data mining issue of mining association rules from customer databases and transaction databases. The problem is decomposed into two subproblems: identifying all the large itemsets from the transaction database and mining association rules from the customer database and the large itemsets identified. For the first subproblem, we propose an efficient algorithm to discover all the large itemsets from the transaction database. Experimental results show that by our approach, the total execution time can be reduced significantly. For the second subproblem, a relationship graph is constructed according to the identified large itemsets from the transaction database and the priorities of condition attributes from the customer database. Based on the relationship graph, we present an efficient graph-based algorithm to discover interesting association rules embedded in the transaction database and the customer database.     

Deriving support threshold values and membership functions using the multiple-level cluster-based master–slave IFG approach

Today, development of e-commerce has provided many transaction databases with useful information for investigators exploring dependencies among the items. In data mining, the dependencies among different items can be shown using an association rule. The new fuzzy-genetic (FG) approach is designed to mine fuzzy association rules from a quantitative transaction database. Three important advantages are associated with using the FG approach: (1) the association rules can be extracted from the transaction database with a quantitative value; (2) extracting proper membership functions and support threshold values with the genetic algorithm will exert a positive effect on the mining process results; (3) expressing the association rules in a fuzzy representation is more understandable for humans. In this paper, we design a comprehensive and fast algorithm that mines level-crossing fuzzy association rules on multiple concept levels with learning support threshold values and membership functions using the cluster-based master–slave integrated FG approach. Mining the fuzzy association rules on multiple concept levels helps find more important, useful, accurate, and practical information.     

空间关联规则的双向挖掘

空间数据库中关联规则挖掘不仅需要考虑关系元组属性之间的关系——纵向关系,更需要挖掘元组之间的关系——横向关系,如相邻、相交、重叠等。本文通过分析空间数据库的存储模式,借鉴事务数据库关联规则的挖掘方法,对空间关联规则进行完整定义,并对规则的兴趣度度量进行探讨。根据挖掘的方向将空间数据挖掘归纳为纵向挖掘、横向挖掘、双向挖掘。在双向挖掘中,提出一种新算法,该算法根据挖掘任务进行约束,缩小挖掘空间,然后通过空间计算将空间关系转化为非空间关系,经过多次循环,获取非空间项集,进而挖掘出空间关联规则。据此提出空间数据双向挖掘工作流程,并通过实例进行了验证。     

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。     

An efficient cluster and decomposition algorithm for mining association rules

Conventional algorithms for mining association rules operate in a combination of smaller large itemsets. This paper presents a new efficient which combines both the cluster concept and decomposition of larger candidate itemsets, while proceeds from mining the maximal large itemsets down to large 1-itemsets, named cluster-decomposition association rule (CDAR). First, the CDAR method creates some clusters by reading the database only once, and then clustering the transaction records to the kth cluster, where the length of a record is k. Then, the large k-itemsets are generated by contrasts with the kth cluster only, unlike the combination concept that contrasts with the entire database. Experiments with real-life databases show that CDAR outperforms Apriori, a well-known and widely used association rule.     

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.     

Using a hash-based method with transaction trimming for miningassociation rules

We examine the issue of mining association rules among items in a large database of sales transactions. Mining association rules means that, given a database of sales transactions, to discover all associations among items such that the presence of some items in a transaction will imply the presence of other items in the same transaction. The mining of association rules can be mapped into the problem of discovering large itemsets where a large itemset is a group of items that appear in a sufficient number of transactions. The problem of discovering large itemsets can be solved by constructing a candidate set of itemsets first, and then, identifying, within this candidate set, these itemsets that meet the large itemset requirement. Generally, this is done iteratively for each large k-itemset in increasing order of k, where a large k-itemset is a large itemset with k items. To determine large itemsets from a huge number of candidate sets in early iterations is usually the dominating factor for the overall data mining performance. To address this issue, we develop an effective algorithm for the candidate set generation. It is a hash-based algorithm and is especially effective for the generation of a candidate set for large 2-itemsets. Explicitly, the number of candidate 2-itemsets generated by the proposed algorithm is, in orders of magnitude, smaller than that by previous methods, thus resolving the performance bottleneck. Note that the generation of smaller candidate sets enables us to effectively trim the transaction database size at a much earlier stage of the iterations, thereby reducing the computational cost for later iterations significantly. The advantage of the proposed algorithm also provides us the opportunity of reducing the amount of disk I/O required. An extensive simulation study is conducted to evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm     

Mining fuzzy specific rare itemsets for education data

Association rule mining is an important data analysis method for the discovery of associations within data. There have been many studies focused on finding fuzzy association rules from transaction databases. Unfortunately, in the real world, one may have available relatively infrequent data, as well as frequent data. From infrequent data, we can find a set of rare itemsets that will be useful for teachers to find out which students need extra help in learning. While the previous association rules discovery techniques are able to discover some rules based on frequency, this is insufficient to determine the importance of a rule composed of frequency-based data items. To remedy this problem, we develop a new algorithm based on the Apriori approach to mine fuzzy specific rare itemsets from quantitative data. Finally, fuzzy association rules can be generated from these fuzzy specific rare itemsets. The patterns are useful to discover learning problems. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to discover interesting and valuable patterns from the survey data.     

应用于入侵检测系统的报警关联的改进Apriori算法

在众多的关联规则挖掘算法中,Apriori算法是最为经典的一个,但Apriori算法有以下缺陷：需要扫描多次数据库、生成大量候选集以及迭代求解频繁项集。提出了一种一步交集操作得到最大频繁项目集的方法。支持度由交集的次数得到而无需再去扫描事务数据库,将其中一些属性进行编号能减少存储空间且方便搜索候选集列表,从而提高算法的效率。最后针对入侵检测系统形成关联规则。实验结果表明,优化后的算法能有效地提高关联规则挖掘的效率。     

Efficient mining of intertransaction association rules

Most of the previous studies on mining association rules are on mining intratransaction associations, i.e., the associations among items within the same transaction. We extend the scope to include multidimensional, intertransaction associations. In a database of stock price information, an example of such an association is "if (company) A's stock goes up on day one, B's stock will go down on day two but go up on day four:" whether we treat company or day as the unit of transaction, the items belong to different transactions. Moreover, such an intertransaction association can be extended to associate multiple properties in the same rule, so that multidimensional intertransaction associations can also be defined and discovered. Mining intertransaction associations pose more challenges on efficient processing than mining intratransaction associations because the number of potential association rules is extremely large. We introduce the notion of intertransaction association rule and develop an efficient algorithm, FITI (first intra then inter), for mining intertransaction associations, which adopts two major ideas: 1) an intertransaction frequent itemset contains only the frequent itemsets of its corresponding intratransaction counterpart; and 2) a special data structure is built among intratransaction frequent itemsets for efficient mining of intertransaction frequent itemsets.     

Discovering knowledge from large databases using prestored information

In this paper, we examine the two issues of mining association rules and mining sequential patterns in a large database of sales transactions. The problems of mining association rules and mining sequential patterns focus on discovering large itemsets and large sequences, respectively. We present PSI and PSI_seq for efficient large itemsets generation and large sequences generation, respectively. The main ideas of these two algorithms are using prestored information to minimize the numbers of candidate itemsets and candidate sequences counted in each database scan. The prestored informations for PSI and PSI_seq include the itemsets and the sequences along with their support counts found in the last mining, respectively. Typically a user may require to tune the value of the minimum support many times before a set of useful association rules can be obtained from the transaction database. Using prestored information, the total computation time will be reduced effectively. Empirical results show that our approaches outperform previous methods by an order of magnitude, using little storage space for the prestored information.     

基于项目集知识库的关联规则挖掘与更新的高效算法

通过对已有的诸关联规则挖掘与更新算法进行深入的分析和研究，指出了其共同存在的问题与不足，提出了一种基于项目集知识库的关联规则挖掘与更新方法。该方法既适应当数据库D中数据不变而用户指定的最小支持度和最小置信度这两个阈值变化的情况，也适合事务数据库D中数据发生变化的情况。当事务数据库D中数据不变时，仅需扫描数据库一次，便可建立项目集知识库KBD，然后可反复调整最小支持度和最小置信度进行关联规则挖掘与更新。而当事务数据库D中数据发生变化时，仅需扫描数据集d 和d-各一次；通过对项目集知识库KBD的更新来达到对频繁项目集和关联规则的更新。     

大型数据库的模糊关联规则挖掘算法研究

为解决传统关联规则挖掘算法对大规模连续数据库进行挖掘时所产生的信息损失和效率低下等问题,给出一种改进的模糊关联规则挖掘算法,称为F-ARMVLQD算法。该算法利用模糊均值聚类算法解决离散属性间隔之间出现"尖锐边界"的问题,同时算法引入有向无环图和字节向量用以提高频繁项目集的计算效率,并吸取分区算法的优势,解决对该数据库挖掘时磁盘操作频繁的问题,整个算法只需扫描两次数据库。实验结果表明,该算法比传统算法具有更高的执行效率。     

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.     

基于分区分类法快速更新频繁项集

目前已提出了许多频繁项集更新算法,但是它们往往需要至少扫描一次原数据库,且会丢失一些重要规则。为此,文章提出了一种新的快速更新频繁项集算法CUFIA(Classifying Update Frequent Itemsets Algorithm),该算法通过对新增事务数据分区后快速逐一扫描,获得频繁项集,并将它们归入3个不同的类别,从而不需要扫描原数据库,便可有效地挖掘出其中的频繁项集,且不丢失重要规则。研究表明,该算法具有很好的可测量性。     

CBAR: an efficient method for mining association rules

The discovery of association rules is an important data-mining task for which many algorithms have been proposed. However, the efficiency of these algorithms needs to be improved to handle real-world large datasets. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm named cluster-based association rule (CBAR). The CBAR method is to create cluster tables by scanning the database once, and then clustering the transaction records to the k-th cluster table, where the length of a record is k. Moreover, the large itemsets are generated by contrasts with the partial cluster tables. This not only prunes considerable amounts of data reducing the time needed to perform data scans and requiring less contrast, but also ensures the correctness of the mined results. Experiments with the FoodMart transaction database provided by Microsoft SQL Server show that CBAR outperforms Apriori, a well-known and widely used association rule.     

Mining Informative Rule Set for Prediction

Mining transaction databases for association rules usually generates a large number of rules, most of which are unnecessary when used for subsequent prediction. In this paper we define a rule set for a given transaction database that is much smaller than the association rule set but makes the same predictions as the association rule set by the confidence priority. We call this rule set informative rule set. The informative rule set is not constrained to particular target items; and it is smaller than the non-redundant association rule set. We characterise relationships between the informative rule set and non-redundant association rule set. We present an algorithm to directly generate the informative rule set without generating all frequent itemsets first that accesses the database less frequently than other direct methods. We show experimentally that the informative rule set is much smaller and can be generated more efficiently than both the association rule set and non-redundant association rule set.     

一种基于多数组的频繁模式挖掘算法

提出了一种新颖的频繁模式挖掘算法,该算法与现有的挖掘算法相比具有明显的优点,首先,该算法不需要产生候选项集,其次该算法具有更少的数据库扫描次数,该算法在中小型数据库上挖掘关联规则只需要扫描交易数据库一次,对于大型交易数据库的关联规则挖掘最多也只需要扫描交易数据库两次。因而,该算法与现有的频繁模式挖掘算法相比具有更高的效率。     

一种改进的Apriori关联规则挖掘算法（英文）

关联规则挖掘是数据挖掘中的一个重要研究内容.为了高效、快速地从事务数据库中挖掘出频繁项集,针对数据挖掘的经典关联规则Apriori算法的瓶颈问题提出了改进的方法.算法将事物数据库映射到布尔型数组中,然后所有的操作都针对数组元素值展开.这样大大减少了数据库的扫描次数.算法利用数组的随机访问特性及布尔型数据的简单"与"操作,直接产生频繁项集,而不产生大量的候选项集.经理论分析和实验结果显示该算法在效率上明显优于Apriori 算法.     

某机载雷达数据库关联规则挖掘算法研究

某机载雷达数据库中包含大量连续属性和分类属性,且数据库规模庞大。为此,给出一种改进的模糊关联规则挖掘算法。该算法引入有向无环图和字节向量用以提高频繁项目集的计算效率,解决挖掘时磁盘操作频繁的问题,并定义新的模糊度量提高正规则的识别概率。实验结果表明,该算法比传统算法具有更高的执行效率和准确率。