Multi objective association rule mining with genetic algorithm without specifying minimum support and minimum confidence

Multi objective processing can be leveraged for mining the association rules. This paper discusses the application of multi objective genetic algorithm to association rule mining. We focus our attention especially on association rule mining. This paper proposes a method based on genetic algorithm without taking the minimum support and confidence into account. In order to improve algorithm efficiency, we apply the FP-tree algorithm. Our method extracts the best rules that have best correlation between support and confidence. The operators of our method are flexible for changing the fitness. Unlike the Apriori-based algorithm, it does not depend on support. Experimental study shows that our technique outperforms the traditional methods.     

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.     

大规模数据集的增量式关联规则挖掘

商业活动和工程实践中通常会积累一些大规模的携带重要信息的数据,由于这种数据集经常有更新且数据量较大,在对它们进行增量式关联规则挖掘时,若采用基于传统的Apriori算法进行计算,一方面难以取得较好的效率;另一方面支持度设置过低会产生大量的冗余规则,设置过高则会把一些支持度不高但有用的规则过滤掉而导致算法对这些新规则感应迟钝。因此,借助遗传算法的相关机理,同时结合自然界的免疫进化理论及相关仿生机制,提出一种IOGA（Immune Optimization based Genetic Algorithm,基于免疫优化的遗传算法）增量式关联规则挖掘方法。通过实验表明,该方法应用于大规模数据集的增量式关联规则挖掘时,可以及时地感知规则的变更并发现有用的规则,减少了冗余规则的产生,同时挖掘效率也有明显提高。     

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.     

最大值控制的多最小支持度关联规则挖掘算法

大部分关联规则挖掘算法使用同一最小支持度阈值进行挖掘,但在实际使用中由干各项目发生频率的不同,理应有不同的最小支持度支持。该文提出了一种多最小支持度关联规则挖掘算法,为每一项目设置一最小支持度,同时在生成舒选集和最大频繁集的过程中使用最大值控制来实现剪枝,有效地提高了该算法的效率,最后用一个超市销售物品的例子来说明该算法的使用。     

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.     

Association rule mining using binary particle swarm optimization

In this paper, we developed a binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) based association rule miner. Our BPSO based association rule miner generates the association rules from the transactional database by formulating a combinatorial global optimization problem, without specifying the minimum support and minimum confidence unlike the a priori algorithm. Our algorithm generates the best M rules from the given database, where M is a given number. The quality of the rule is measured by a fitness function defined as the product of support and confidence. The effectiveness of our algorithm is tested on a real life bank dataset from commercial bank in India and three transactional datasets viz. books database, food items dataset and dataset of the general store taken from literature. Based on the results, we infer that our algorithm can be used as an alternative to the a priori algorithm and the FP-growth algorithm.     

Efficient Adaptive-Support Association Rule Mining for Recommender Systems

Collaborative recommender systems allow personalization for e-commerce by exploiting similarities and dissimilarities among customers' preferences. We investigate the use of association rule mining as an underlying technology for collaborative recommender systems. Association rules have been used with success in other domains. However, most currently existing association rule mining algorithms were designed with market basket analysis in mind. Such algorithms are inefficient for collaborative recommendation because they mine many rules that are not relevant to a given user. Also, it is necessary to specify the minimum support of the mined rules in advance, often leading to either too many or too few rules; this negatively impacts the performance of the overall system. We describe a collaborative recommendation technique based on a new algorithm specifically designed to mine association rules for this purpose. Our algorithm does not require the minimum support to be specified in advance. Rather, a target range is given for the number of rules, and the algorithm adjusts the minimum support for each user in order to obtain a ruleset whose size is in the desired range. Rules are mined for a specific target user, reducing the time required for the mining process. We employ associations between users as well as associations between items in making recommendations. Experimental evaluation of a system based on our algorithm reveals performance that is significantly better than that of traditional correlation-based approaches.     

Hybrid genetic algorithm and association rules for mining workflow best practices

Business workflow analysis has become crucial in strategizing how to create competitive edge. Consequently, deriving a series of positively correlated association rules from workflows is essential to identify strong relationships among key business activities. These rules can subsequently, serve as best practices. We have addressed this problem by hybridizing genetic algorithm with association rules. First, we used correlation to replace support-confidence in genetic algorithm to enable dynamic data-driven determination of support and confidence, i.e., use correlation to optimize the derivation of positively correlated association rules. Second, we used correlation as fitness function to support upward closure in association rules (hitherto, association rules support only downward closure). The ability to support upward closure allows derivation of the most specific association rules (business model) from less specific association rules (business meta-model) and generic association rules (reference meta-model). Downward closure allows the opposite. Upward-downward closures allow the manager to drill-down and analyze based on the degree of dependency among business activities. Subsequently, association rules can be used to describe best practices at the model, meta-model and reference meta-model levels with the most general positively dependent association rules as reference meta-model. Experiments are based on an online hotel reservation system.     

多最小支持度策略的关联规则挖掘方法

关联规则的数据挖掘是当今数据挖掘领域的重要内容之一 .国内现有的关联规则挖掘算法大多是在最小支持度的限定条件下 ,发现挖掘数据的各属性间的所有关联型知识 .而事实上由于基于不同数据属性的事件的发生频率是不同的 ,这样仅通过唯一的支持度限定的挖掘就无法正确反映挖掘对象本身的特征 .本文从客观事实的本质出发 ,在原有 Apriori算法的基础上 ,采用了一种多支持度的关联规则挖掘策略 .最后通过实验结果表明 ,这种挖掘方法能够更加准确和高效地进行知识挖掘 .     

Mining optimized support rules for numeric attributes

Mining association rules on large data sets have received considerable attention in recent years. Association rules are useful for determining correlations between attributes of a relation and have applications in marketing, financial and retail sectors. Furthermore, optimized association rules are an effective way to focus on the most interesting characteristics involving certain attributes. Optimized association rules are permitted to contain uninstantiated attributes and the problem is to determine instantiations such that either the support, confidence or gain of the rule is maximized. In this paper, we generalize the optimized support association rule problem by permitting rules to contain disjunctions over uninstantiated numeric attributes. Our generalized association rules enable us to extract more useful information about seasonal and local patterns involving the uninstantiated attribute. For rules containing a single numeric attribute, we present a dynamic programming algorithm for computing optimized association rules. Furthermore, we propose bucketing technique for reducing the input size, and a divide and conquer strategy that improves the performance significantly without sacrificing optimality. We also present approximation algorithms based on dynamic programming for two numeric attributes. Our experimental results for a single numeric attribute indicate that our bucketing and divide and conquer enhancements are very effective in reducing the execution times and memory requirements of our dynamic programming algorithm. Furthermore, they show that our algorithms scale up almost linearly with the attribute's domain size as well as the number of disjunctions.     

关联规则挖掘在煤矿安全监测中的应用

为了从大量的煤矿安全监测数据中获取有用的知识,来指导煤矿安全预警工作,本文将关联规则挖掘算法应用于安全监测数据的数据挖掘。根据数据的特点,对数据进行了预处理后,采用了多维关联规则挖掘算法。文章设计并实现了安全监测数据的关联规则挖掘系统。通过该系统,用户在设置最小支持度和最小置信度阈值后,就可以挖掘出关联规则。     

Mining the optimal class association rule set

We define an optimal class association rule set to be the minimum rule set with the same predictive power of the complete class association rule set. Using this rule set instead of the complete class association rule set we can avoid redundant computation that would otherwise be required for mining predictive association rules and hence improve the efficiency of the mining process significantly. We present an efficient algorithm for mining the optimal class association rule set using an upward closure property of pruning weak rules before they are actually generated. We have implemented the algorithm and our experimental results show that our algorithm generates the optimal class association rule set, whose size is smaller than 1/17 of the complete class association rule set on average, in significantly less rime than generating the complete class association rule set. Our proposed criterion has been shown very effective for pruning weak rules in dense databases.     

An efficient approach for mining cross-level closed itemsets and minimal association rules using closed itemset lattices

Multilevel knowledge in transactional databases plays a significant role in our real-life market basket analysis. Many researchers have mined the hierarchical association rules and thus proposed various approaches. However, some of the existing approaches produce many multilevel and cross-level association rules that fail to convey quality information. From these large number of redundant association rules, it is extremely difficult to extract any meaningful information. There also exist some approaches that mine minimal association rules, but these have many shortcomings due to their naïve-based approaches. In this paper, we have focused on the need for generating hierarchical minimal rules that provide maximal information. An algorithm has been proposed to derive minimal multilevel association rules and cross-level association rules. Our work has made significant contributions in mining the minimal cross-level association rules, which express the mixed relationship between the generalized and specialized view of the transaction itemsets. We are the first to design an efficient algorithm using a closed itemset lattice-based approach, which can mine the most relevant minimal cross-level association rules. The parent–child relationship of the lattices has been exploited while mining cross-level closed itemset lattices. We have extensively evaluated our proposed algorithm’s efficiency using a variety of real-life datasets and performing a large number of experiments. The proposed algorithm has outperformed the existing related work significantly during the pervasive performance comparison.     

分组多支持度关联规则研究

关联规则是数据挖掘的重要任务之一,传统关联规则算法只有一个最小支持度,假设项出现的频率大致相同,而在谮实际中并非如此,由此产生了多支持度关联规则问题.该问题针对每个项给定不同的支持度,而在实际应用中项可以划分成若干个组,每组有一个支持度.由此提出了分组多支持度关联规则问题,针对该问题给出了基于多支持度性质对项进行分组的方法.该方法可以降低2-项候选集的数目.在此基础上,进一步给出了相应的多支持度关联规则发现算法,并通过实验证明了算法的有效性.     

On the use of design defect examples to detect model refactoring opportunities

Design defects are symptoms of design decay, which can lead to several maintenance problems. To detect these defects, most of existing research is based on the definition of rules that represent a combination of software metrics. These rules are sometimes not enough to detect design defects since it is difficult to find the best threshold values; the rules do not take into consideration the programming context, and it is challenging to find the best combination of metrics. As an alternative, we propose in this paper to identify design defects using a genetic algorithm based on the similarity/distance between the system under study and a set of defect examples without the need to define detection rules. We tested our approach on four open-source systems to identify three potential design defects. The results of our experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

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。     

改进的增量式关联规则维护算法

挖掘关联规则是数据挖掘研究的一个重要方面，而维护已发现的关联规则同样是重要的。在分析现有的关联规则算法IUA的基础上，指出了该算法的不足和错误之处，并加以改正，进而提出了一种改进的增量式更新算法EIUA。EIUA算法解决了在数据库D不变的情况下，当最小支持度和最小置信度二阈值发生变化时如何高效更新关联规则的问题。实验分析表明了新算法的有效性和优越性。     

空间关联规则的增量维护

为了得到有趣且有效的空间关联规则通常需要多次执行挖掘操作,可以使用增量维护算法来提高挖掘效率。然而,能够直接使用空间数据的关联规则增量更新算法尚属空白。为解决这一问题,对挖掘阈值改变和空间数据集更新后通过筛选或增量挖掘等方法实现规则维护的策略进行了分析,并提出适用于支持度阈值减小和空间图层增加这两类情况的增量挖掘算法——ISA。ISA算法不依赖于空间事务表的构建与更新,可以直接使用空间图层作为输入数据。在基于实际数据的实验中,采用ISA算法所得结果与类Apriori算法一致,耗时则相对缩短20.0%至71.0%;此外,对1372772条规则进行了基于筛选的更新,耗时低于0.1s。实验结果表明,所提出的空间关联规则增量维护策略和算法是可行、正确且高效的。     

基于改进倒排表和集合的最频繁项集挖掘算法

最频繁项集挖掘是文本关联规则挖掘中研究的重点和难点,它决定了文本关联规则挖掘算法的性能。针对当前在最频繁项集挖掘方面的不足,将集合论引入倒排表以对其进行改进,然后以此为基础提出了几个命题和推论,并结合最小支持度阈值动态调整策略,提出了一个基于改进的倒排表和集合理论的最频繁项集挖掘算法,最后对所提算法进行验证。实验结果表明,所提算法的规则有效率和时间性能比常用的两个最频繁项集挖掘算法,即NApriori和IntvMatrix算法都好。