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.     

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.     

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 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.     

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.     

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 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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

An effective parallel approach for genetic-fuzzy data mining

Data mining is most commonly used in attempts to induce association rules from transaction data. In the past, we used the fuzzy and GA concepts to discover both useful fuzzy association rules and suitable membership functions from quantitative values. The evaluation for fitness values was, however, quite time-consuming. Due to dramatic increases in available computing power and concomitant decreases in computing costs over the last decade, learning or mining by applying parallel processing techniques has become a feasible way to overcome the slow-learning problem. In this paper, we thus propose a parallel genetic-fuzzy mining algorithm based on the master–slave architecture to extract both association rules and membership functions from quantitative transactions. The master processor uses a single population as a simple genetic algorithm does, and distributes the tasks of fitness evaluation to slave processors. The evolutionary processes, such as crossover, mutation and production are performed by the master processor. It is very natural and efficient to run the proposed algorithm on the master–slave architecture. The time complexities for both sequential and parallel genetic-fuzzy mining algorithms have also been analyzed, with results showing the good effect of the proposed one. When the number of generations is large, the speed-up can be nearly linear. The experimental results also show this point. Applying the master–slave parallel architecture to speed up the genetic-fuzzy data mining algorithm is thus a feasible way to overcome the low-speed fitness evaluation problem of the original algorithm.     

Multi-objective genetic algorithms based automated clustering for fuzzy association rules mining

Researchers realized the importance of integrating fuzziness into association rules mining in databases with binary and quantitative attributes. However, most of the earlier algorithms proposed for fuzzy association rules mining either assume that fuzzy sets are given or employ a clustering algorithm, like CURE, to decide on fuzzy sets; for both cases the number of fuzzy sets is pre-specified. In this paper, we propose an automated method to decide on the number of fuzzy sets and for the autonomous mining of both fuzzy sets and fuzzy association rules. We achieve this by developing an automated clustering method based on multi-objective Genetic Algorithms (GA); the aim of the proposed approach is to automatically cluster values of a quantitative attribute in order to obtain large number of large itemsets in less time. We compare the proposed multi-objective GA based approach with two other approaches, namely: 1) CURE-based approach, which is known as one of the most efficient clustering algorithms; 2) Chien et al. clustering approach, which is an automatic interval partition method based on variation of density. Experimental results on 100 K transactions extracted from the adult data of USA census in year 2000 showed that the proposed automated clustering method exhibits good performance over both CURE-based approach and Chien et al.’s work in terms of runtime, number of large itemsets and number of association rules.     

Cluster-Based Evaluation in Fuzzy-Genetic Data Mining

Data mining is commonly used in attempts to induce association rules from transaction data. Most previous studies focused on binary-valued transaction data. Transactions in real-world applications, however, usually consist of quantitative values. In the past, we proposed a fuzzy-genetic data-mining algorithm for extracting both association rules and membership functions from quantitative transactions. It used a combination of large 1-itemsets and membership-function suitability to evaluate the fitness values of chromosomes. The calculation for large 1-itemsets could take a lot of time, especially when the database to be scanned could not totally fed into main memory. In this paper, an enhanced approach, called the cluster-based fuzzy-genetic mining algorithm, 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 clusters by the - means clustering approach and evaluates each individual according to both cluster and their own information. Experimental results also show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.     

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.     

Determining membership functions and minimum fuzzy support in finding fuzzy association rules for classification problems

This paper propose a new method, that employs the genetic algorithm, to find fuzzy association rules for classification problems based on an effective method for discovering the fuzzy association rules, namely the fuzzy grids based rules mining algorithm (FGBRMA). It is considered that some important parameters, including the number and shapes of membership functions in each quantitative attribute and the minimum fuzzy support, are not easily user-specified. Thus, the above-mentioned parameters are automatically determined by a binary string or chromosome is composed of two substrings: one for each quantitative attribute by the coding method proposed by Ishibuchi and Murata, and the other for the minimum fuzzy support. In each generation, the fitness value, which maximizes the classification accuracy rate and minimizes the number of fuzzy rules, of each chromosome can be obtained. When reaching the termination condition, a chromosome with maximum fitness value is then used to test its performance. For classification generalization ability, the simulation results from the iris data and the appendicitis data demonstrate that proposed method performs well in comparison with other classification methods.     

模糊Horn子句规则挖掘算法研究

模糊关联规则可以用自然语言来表达人类知识,受到数据挖掘与知识发现研究人员的广泛关注。但是,目前大多数模糊关联规则挖掘方法仍然基于经典关联规则的支持度和可信度测度。从模糊蕴涵的观点出发,定义了模糊Horn子句规则、支持度、蕴涵强度以及相关概念,提出了模糊Horn子句规则挖掘算法。该算法可以分解为3个步骤。首先,将定量数据库转换为模糊数据库。其次,挖掘模糊数据库中所有支持度不小于指定最小支持度阂值的频繁项目集。一旦得到了所有频繁项目集,就可以用一种直接的方法生成所有蕴涵强度不小于指定最小蕴涵强度阂值的模糊Horn子句规则。     

基于最大值约束的模糊关联规则挖掘

数据挖掘是从数据库中发现潜在有用知识或者感兴趣模式的过程。在数据挖掘领域中主要集中于单一支持度下的关联规则挖掘,在事务数据库中发现项目之间的关联性,而在实际应用中,项目可以有不同的最小支持度,不同的项目可能具有不同的标准去判断其重要性,因此提出一个在最大值支持度约束下,发现有用的模糊关联规则挖掘算法,在该约束下,利用逐层搜索的迭代方法发现频繁项目集,通过实例证明了该挖掘算法是易于理解和有意义的,具有很好的效率。     

改进的最大值约束的多最小支持度挖掘算法

数据挖掘是从大量不完全的、有噪声的、模糊的、随机的数据中,提取隐含在其中的,事先不为人知的,但又潜在的有用的信息和知识的过程.使用一种挖掘算法,用簇集表格来存储数据库中的项目,利用最大值约束下的多最小支持度挖掘算法综合以得出关联规则.