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.     

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。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Mining fuzzy association rules from low-quality data

Data mining is most commonly used in attempts to induce association rules from databases which can help decision-makers easily analyze the data and make good decisions regarding the domains concerned. Different studies have proposed methods for mining association rules from databases with crisp values. However, the data in many real-world applications have a certain degree of imprecision. In this paper we address this problem, and propose a new data-mining algorithm for extracting interesting knowledge from databases with imprecise data. The proposed algorithm integrates imprecise data concepts and the fuzzy apriori mining algorithm to find interesting fuzzy association rules in given databases. Experiments for diagnosing dyslexia in early childhood were made to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm.     

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 multi-level ant-colony mining algorithm for membership functions

Fuzzy data mining is used to extract fuzzy knowledge from linguistic or quantitative data. It is an extension of traditional data mining and the derived knowledge is relatively meaningful to human beings. In the past, we proposed a mining algorithm to find suitable membership functions for fuzzy association rules based on ant colony systems. In that approach, precision was limited by the use of binary bits to encode the membership functions. This paper elaborates on the original approach to increase the accuracy of results by adding multi-level processing. A multi-level ant colony framework is thus designed and an algorithm based on the structure is proposed to achieve the purpose. The proposed approach first transforms the fuzzy mining problem into a multi-stage graph, with each route representing a possible set of membership functions. The new approach then extends the previous one, using multi-level processing to solve the problem in which the maximum quantities of item values in the transactions may be large. The membership functions derived in a given level will be refined in the subsequent level. The final membership functions in the last level are then outputted to the rule-mining phase to find fuzzy association rules. Experiments are also performed to show the performance of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the proposed multi-level ant colony systems mining approach can obtain improved results.     

A novel unsupervised fuzzy clustering method for preprocessing of quantitative attributes in association rule mining

In Association rule mining, the quantitative attribute values are converted into Boolean values using fixed intervals. Conventional association rule mining algorithms are then applied to find relations among the attribute values. These intervals may not be concise and meaningful enough for human users to easily obtain non trivial knowledge from those rules discovered. Clustering techniques can be used for segmenting quantitative values into meaningful groups instead of fixed intervals. But the conventional clustering techniques like k-means and c-means require the user to specify the number of clusters and initial cluster centres. This initialization is one of the major challenges of clustering. A novel fuzzy based unsupervised clustering algorithm proposed by the authors is extended to segment quantitative values into fuzzy clusters in this paper. Membership values of quantitative items in the partitioning fuzzy clusters are used with weighted fuzzy rule mining techniques to find natural association rules. This fuzzy based method for handling quantitative attributes is compared with that of fixed intervals and segmenting using conventional k-means clustering method along with Apriori 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 fuzzy coherent rule mining algorithm

In real-world applications, transactions usually consist of quantitative values. Many fuzzy data mining approaches have thus been proposed for finding fuzzy association rules with the predefined minimum support from the give quantitative transactions. However, the common problems of those approaches are that an appropriate minimum support is hard to set, and the derived rules usually expose common-sense knowledge which may not be interesting in business point of view. In this paper, an algorithm for mining fuzzy coherent rules is proposed for overcoming those problems with the properties of propositional logic. It first transforms quantitative transactions into fuzzy sets. Then, those generated fuzzy sets are collected to generate candidate fuzzy coherent rules. Finally, contingency tables are calculated and used for checking those candidate fuzzy coherent rules satisfy the four criteria or not. If yes, it is a fuzzy coherent rule. Experiments on the foodmart dataset are also made to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

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.     

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.     

基于RPCL的模糊关联规则挖掘

在模糊关联规则的挖掘过程中,很难预先知道每个属性合适的模糊集。针对该问题,提出基于次胜者受罚竞争学习的模糊关联规则挖掘算法,无需先验知识,即可根据每个属性的性质找出对应的模糊集,并确定模糊集的数目。实验结果表明,与同类算法相比,该算法可以挖掘出更多有趣的关联规则。     

挖掘语言值关联规则

讨论了大型数据库上数量属性的关联规则问题.为了软化论域的划分边界,应用相关的模糊c-方法(relationalfuzzyc-means,简称RFCM)算法确定正态模糊数的两个参数,并借助正态模糊数模型来划分数量属性的论域,由此生成一系列的语言值关联规则.另外,给出了语言值关联规则的挖掘方法.由于语言值能很好地表示抽象的概念,从而使得挖掘出的关联规则更抽象、更容易被人理解.     

快速多层次关联规则的挖掘

知识发现是指对原始数据进行分析，提取出隐含的，有用的规则，是当前快速发展的研究领域，是知识获取的重要方法，关联规则是知识发现的重要研究内容之一，本文提出了一种新的多层次关联规则挖掘算法ＭＬ＿ＡＲ，算法ＭＬ＿ＡＲ在挖掘过程中，只对最低概括层次上的候选系模式进行模式的匹配计算，求解出简化的频繁式集合，最后再求解各个概括层次上的繁频模式集合，算法ＭＬ＿ＡＲ有效地利用了概括的层次关系，减少了模式的匹配计算     

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.