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.     

Multi-objective genetic algorithm based approaches for mining optimized fuzzy association rules

Association rules form one of the most widely used techniques to discover correlations among attribute in a database. So far, some efficient methods have been proposed to obtain these rules with respect to an optimal goal, such as: to maximize the number of large itemsets and interesting rules or the values of support and confidence for the discovered rules. This paper first introduces optimized fuzzy association rule mining in terms of three important criteria; strongness, interestingness and comprehensibility. Then, it proposes multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (GA) based approaches for discovering these optimized rules. Optimization technique according to given criterion may be one of two different forms; The first tries to determine the appropriate fuzzy sets of quantitative attributes in a prespecified rule, which is also called as certain rule. The second deals with finding both uncertain rules and their appropriate fuzzy sets. Experimental results conducted on a real data set show the effectiveness and applicability 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.     

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。     

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.     

不确定性数据中基于GSO优化MF的模糊关联规则挖掘方法

针对不确定性数据中模糊关联规则的挖掘问题,提出一种基于群搜索优化(GSO)算法优化隶属度函数(MF)的模糊关联规则挖掘方法。首先,将不确定性数据通过三元语言表示模型进行表示;然后,给定一个初始MF,并以最大化模糊项集支持度和语义可解释性作为适应度函数,通过GSO算法的优化学习获得最佳MF;最后,根据获得的最佳MF,利用改进型的FFP-growth算法来从不确定数据中挖掘模糊关联规则。实验结果表明,该方法能够根据数据集自适应优化MF,以此实现从不确定数据中有效地挖掘关联规则。     

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。     

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。     

Linguistic frequent pattern mining using a compressed structure

Traditional association-rule mining (ARM) considers only the frequency of items in a binary database, which provides insufficient knowledge for making efficient decisions and strategies. The mining of useful information from quantitative databases is not a trivial task compared to conventional algorithms in ARM. Fuzzy-set theory was invented to represent a more valuable form of knowledge for human reasoning, which can also be applied and utilized for quantitative databases. Many approaches have adopted fuzzy-set theory to transform the quantitative value into linguistic terms with its corresponding degree based on defined membership functions for the discovery of FFIs, also known as fuzzy frequent itemsets. Only linguistic terms with maximal scalar cardinality are considered in traditional fuzzy frequent itemset mining, but the uncertainty factor is not involved in past approaches. In this paper, an efficient fuzzy mining (EFM) algorithm is presented to quickly discover multiple FFIs from quantitative databases under type-2 fuzzy-set theory. A compressed fuzzy-list (CFL)-structure is developed to maintain complete information for rule generation. Two pruning techniques are developed for reducing the search space and speeding up the mining process. Several experiments are carried out to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the designed approach in terms of runtime, the number of examined nodes, memory usage, and scalability under different minimum support thresholds and different linguistic terms used in the membership functions.

     

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 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.     

Extracting linguistic rules from data sets using fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms

Linguistic rules in natural language are useful and consistent with human way of thinking. They are very important in multi-criteria decision making due to their interpretability. In this paper, our discussions concentrate on extracting linguistic rules from data sets. In the end, we firstly analyze how to extract complex linguistic data summaries based on fuzzy logic. Then, we formalize linguistic rules based on complex linguistic data summaries, in which, the degree of confidence of linguistic rules from a data set can be explained by linguistic quantifiers and its linguistic truth from the fuzzy logical point of view. In order to obtain a linguistic rule with a higher degree of linguistic truth, a genetic algorithm is used to optimize the number and parameters of membership functions of linguistic values. Computational results show that the proposed method is an alternative method for extracting linguistic rules with linguistic truth from data sets.     

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.     

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。     

基于属性互信息熵的量化关联规则挖掘

在量化关联规则挖掘中存在量化属性及其取值区间的组合爆炸问题,影响算法效率。提出算法BMIQAR,通过考察量化属性间互信息熵,找到具有强信息关系的属性集,从中得到频繁项集以产生规则。实验表明,由于在属性层进行了剪枝,因此缩减了搜索空间,提高了算法的性能,且能得到绝大多数置信度较高的规则。     

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.     

基于隐私保护的关联规则挖掘算法

基于隐私保护的关联规则挖掘在挖掘项集之间的相关联系的同时,可以保护数据提供者的隐私。基于数据变换法,提出使用高效数据结构即倒排文件的隐私保护关联规则挖掘算法IFB-PPARM。针对特定的敏感规则以及给定的最小支持度和置信度,得到所需要修改的敏感事务并对其做适当的处理。算法只需对事务数据库做一次扫描,并且所有对事务的处理操作都在事务数据库映射成的倒排文件中进行。分析表明,该算法具有较好的隐私性和高效性。     

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.     

模糊关联规则算法在入侵检测中的应用

提出了一种结合Apriori和Kuok's算法的改进的模糊关联规则算法.在定义隶属函数、决策树结构和规则集相似度的基础上,采用改进的挖掘算法挖掘数值属性的关联规则.实验结果表明,算法在规则生成和时间效率方面都显示了良好的性能.     

数据库中的模糊逻辑规则发现

关联规则是数据库中的知识发现（KDD）领域的重要研究课题。模糊关联规则可以用自然语言来表达人类知识,近年来受到KDD研究人员的普遍关注。但是,目前大多数模糊关联规则发现方法仍然沿用经典关联规则发现中常用的支持度和置信度测度。事实上,模糊关联规则可以有不同的解释,而且不同的解释对规则发现方法有很大影响。从逻辑的观点出发,定义了模糊逻辑规则、支持度、蕴含度及其相关概念,提出了模糊逻辑规则发现算法,该算法结合了模糊逻辑概念和Apriori算法,从给定的定量数据库中发现模糊逻辑规则。