An ACS-based framework for fuzzy data mining

Data mining is often used to find out interesting and meaningful patterns from huge databases. It may generate different kinds of knowledge such as classification rules, clusters, association rules, and among others. A lot of researches have been proposed about data mining and most of them focused on mining from binary-valued data. Fuzzy data mining was thus proposed to discover fuzzy knowledge from linguistic or quantitative data. Recently, ant colony systems (ACS) have been successfully applied to optimization problems. However, few works have been done on applying ACS to fuzzy data mining. This thesis thus attempts to propose an ACS-based framework for fuzzy data mining. In the framework, the membership functions are first encoded into binary-bits and then fed into the ACS to search for the optimal set of membership functions. The problem is then transformed into a multi-stage graph, with each route representing a possible set of membership functions. When the termination condition is reached, the best membership function set (with the highest fitness value) can then be used to mine fuzzy association rules from a database. At last, experiments are made to make a comparison with other approaches and show the performance of the proposed framework.     

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.     

MICF: An effective sanitization algorithm for hiding sensitive patterns on data mining

Data mining mechanisms have widely been applied in various businesses and manufacturing companies across many industry sectors. Sharing data or sharing mined rules has become a trend among business partnerships, as it is perceived to be a mutually benefit way of increasing productivity for all parties involved. Nevertheless, this has also increased the risk of unexpected information leaks when releasing data. To conceal restrictive itemsets (patterns) contained in the source database, a sanitization process transforms the source database into a released database that the counterpart cannot extract sensitive rules from. The transformed result also conceals non-restrictive information as an unwanted event, called a side effect or the “misses cost”. The problem of finding an optimal sanitization method, which conceals all restrictive itemsets but minimizes the misses cost, is NP-hard. To address this challenging problem, this study proposes the maximum item conflict first (MICF) algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective, has a low sanitization rate, and can generally achieve a significantly lower misses cost than those achieved by the MinFIA, MaxFIA, IGA and Algo2b methods in several real and artificial datasets.     

An efficient data mining approach for discovering interesting knowledge from customer transactions

Mining association rules and mining sequential patterns both are to discover customer purchasing behaviors from a transaction database, such that the quality of business decision can be improved. However, the size of the transaction database can be very large. It is very time consuming to find all the association rules and sequential patterns from a large database, and users may be only interested in some information.

Moreover, the criteria of the discovered association rules and sequential patterns for the user requirements may not be the same. Many uninteresting information for the user requirements can be generated when traditional mining methods are applied. Hence, a data mining language needs to be provided such that users can query only interesting knowledge to them from a large database of customer transactions. In this paper, a data mining language is presented. From the data mining language, users can specify the interested items and the criteria of the association rules or sequential patterns to be discovered. Also, the efficient data mining techniques are proposed to extract the association rules and the sequential patterns according to the user requirements.     

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.     

Novel parallel method for association rule mining on multi-core shared memory systems

Association rule mining (ARM) is an important task in data mining with many practical applications. Current methods for association rule mining have shown unstable performance for different database types and under-utilize the benefits of multi-core shared memory machines. In this paper, we address these issues by presenting a novel parallel method for finding frequent patterns, the most computational intensive phase of ARM. Our proposed method, named ShaFEM, combines two mining strategies and applies the most appropriate one to each data subset of the database to efficiently adapt to the data characteristics and run fast on both sparse and dense databases. In addition, our newlock-free design minimizes the synchronization needs and maximizes the data independence to enhance the scalability. The new structure lends itself well to dynamic job scheduling resulting in a well-balanced load on the new multi-core shared memory architectures. We have evaluated ShaFEM on 12-core multi-socket servers and found that our method run up to 5.8 times faster and consumes memory up to 7.1 times less than the state-of-the-art parallel method. For some test cases, ShaFEM can save up to 4.9 days of execution time over the compared method.     

Perception-based approach to time series data mining

Time series data mining (TSDM) techniques permit exploring large amounts of time series data in search of consistent patterns and/or interesting relationships between variables. TSDM is becoming increasingly important as a knowledge management tool where it is expected to reveal knowledge structures that can guide decision making in conditions of limited certainty. Human decision making in problems related with analysis of time series databases is usually based on perceptions like “end of the day”, “high temperature”, “quickly increasing”, “possible”, etc. Though many effective algorithms of TSDM have been developed, the integration of TSDM algorithms with human decision making procedures is still an open problem. In this paper, we consider architecture of perception-based decision making system in time series databases domains integrating perception-based TSDM, computing with words and perceptions, and expert knowledge. The new tasks which should be solved by the perception-based TSDM methods to enable their integration in such systems are discussed. These tasks include: precisiation of perceptions, shape pattern identification, and pattern retranslation. We show how different methods developed so far in TSDM for manipulation of perception-based information can be used for development of a fuzzy perception-based TSDM approach. This approach is grounded in computing with words and perceptions permitting to formalize human perception-based inference mechanisms. The discussion is illustrated by examples from economics, finance, meteorology, medicine, etc.     

Efficient strategies for parallel mining class association rules

Mining class association rules (CARs) is an essential, but time-intensive task in Associative Classification (AC). A number of algorithms have been proposed to speed up the mining process. However, sequential algorithms are not efficient for mining CARs in large datasets while existing parallel algorithms require communication and collaboration among computing nodes which introduces the high cost of synchronization. This paper addresses these drawbacks by proposing three efficient approaches for mining CARs in large datasets relying on parallel computing. To date, this is the first study which tries to implement an algorithm for parallel mining CARs on a computer with the multi-core processor architecture. The proposed parallel algorithm is theoretically proven to be faster than existing parallel algorithms. The experimental results also show that our proposed parallel algorithm outperforms a recent sequential algorithm in mining time.     

A data mining approach to database compression

Data mining can dig out valuable information from databases to assist a business in approaching knowledge discovery and improving business intelligence. Database stores large structured data. The amount of data increases due to the advanced database technology and extensive use of information systems. Despite the price drop of storage devices, it is still important to develop efficient techniques for database compression. This paper develops a database compression method by eliminating redundant data, which often exist in transaction database. The proposed approach uses a data mining structure to extract association rules from a database. Redundant data will then be replaced by means of compression rules. A heuristic method is designed to resolve the conflicts of the compression rules. To prove its efficiency and effectiveness, the proposed approach is compared with two other database compression methods. Chin-Feng Lee is an associate professor with the Department of Information Management at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1994 and 1998, respectively, from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chung Cheng University. Her current research interests include database design, image processing and data mining techniques. S. Wesley Changchien is a professor with the Institute of Electronic Commerce at National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan, R.O.C. He received a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering (1989) and completed his MS (1993) and Ph.D. (1996) degrees in Industrial Engineering at State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. His current research interests include electronic commerce, internet/database marketing, knowledge management, data mining, and decision support systems. Jau-Ji Shen received his Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering and Computer Science from National Taiwan University at Taipei, Taiwan in 1988. From 1988 to 1994, he was the leader of the software group in Institute of Aeronautic, Chung-Sung Institute of Science and Technology. He is currently an associate professor of information management department in the National Chung Hsing University at Taichung. His research areas focus on the digital multimedia, database and information security. His current research areas focus on data engineering, database techniques and information security. Wei-Tse Wang received the B.A. (2001) and M.B.A (2003) degrees in Information Management at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research interests include data mining, XML, and database compression.     

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.     

An integrated data mining and behavioral scoring model for analyzing bank customers

Analyzing bank databases for customer behavior management is difficult since bank databases are multi-dimensional, comprised of monthly account records and daily transaction records. This study proposes an integrated data mining and behavioral scoring model to manage existing credit card customers in a bank. A self-organizing map neural network was used to identify groups of customers based on repayment behavior and recency, frequency, monetary behavioral scoring predicators. It also classified bank customers into three major profitable groups of customers. The resulting groups of customers were then profiled by customer's feature attributes determined using an Apriori association rule inducer. This study demonstrates that identifying customers by a behavioral scoring model is helpful characteristics of customer and facilitates marketing strategy development.     

Elicitation of classification rules by fuzzy data mining

Data mining techniques can be used to find potentially useful patterns from data and to ease the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in building prototype rule-based systems. Based on the partition methods presented in simple-fuzzy-partition-based method (SFPBM) proposed by Hu et al. (Comput. Ind. Eng. 43(4) (2002) 735), the aim of this paper is to propose a new fuzzy data mining technique consisting of two phases to find fuzzy if–then rules for classification problems: one to find frequent fuzzy grids by using a pre-specified simple fuzzy partition method to divide each quantitative attribute, and the other to generate fuzzy classification rules from frequent fuzzy grids. To improve the classification performance of the proposed method, we specially incorporate adaptive rules proposed by Nozaki et al. (IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst. 4(3) (1996) 238) into our methods to adjust the confidence of each classification rule. For classification generalization ability, the simulation results from the iris data demonstrate that the proposed method may effectively derive fuzzy classification rules from training samples.     

遗传算法在关联规则挖掘中的应用

该文尝试和遗传算法挖掘关联规则，并结合图书馆智能型读者测评系统，给出了一个基于遗传算法进行了关联规则挖掘的实例。     

Positive and negative association rule mining on XML data streams in database as a service concept

In recent years, data mining has become one of the most popular techniques for data owners to determine their strategies. Association rule mining is a data mining approach that is used widely in traditional databases and usually to find the positive association rules. However, there are some other challenging rule mining topics like data stream mining and negative association rule mining. Besides, organizations want to concentrate on their own business and outsource the rest of their work. This approach is named “database as a service concept” and provides lots of benefits to data owner, but, at the same time, brings out some security problems. In this paper, a rule mining system has been proposed that provides efficient and secure solution to positive and negative association rule computation on XML data streams in database as a service concept. The system is implemented and several experiments have been done with different synthetic data sets to show the performance and efficiency of the proposed system.     

An efficient approach to mining indirect associations

Discovering association rules is one of the important tasks in data mining. While most of the existing algorithms are developed for efficient mining of frequent patterns, it has been noted recently that some of the infrequent patterns, such as indirect associations, provide useful insight into the data. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, called HI-mine, based on a new data structure, called HI-struct, for mining the complete set of indirect associations between items. Our experimental results show that HI-mine's performance is significantly better than that of the previously developed algorithm for mining indirect associations on both synthetic and real world data sets over practical ranges of support specifications.     

Novel measurement for mining effective association rules

Mining association rules are widely studied in data mining society. In this paper, we analyze the measure method of support–confidence framework for mining association rules, from which we find it tends to mine many redundant or unrelated rules besides the interesting ones. In order to ameliorate the criterion, we propose a new method of match as the substitution of confidence. We analyze in detail the property of the proposed measurement. Experimental results show that the generated rules by the improved method reveal high correlation between the antecedent and the consequent when the rules were compared with that produced by the support–confidence framework. Furthermore, the improved method decreases the generation of redundant rules.     

分布式并行关联规则挖掘算法研究

关联规则挖掘算法FP-Growth虽然效率比Apriori要快一个数量级,但存在频繁模式树可能过大而内存无法容纳和数据挖掘过程串行处理等两大缺点。提出一种分布式并行关联规则挖掘算法,该算法针对分布式应用数据架构,不需要产生全局FPtree,避免全局FP-tree可能过大而内存无法容纳的问题,算法在各个主要步骤上都实现了并行处理。算法测试结果和分析表明,与传统的关联规则挖掘算法FP-Growth相比,该算法通过多节点分布式并行处理显著提高了执行效率和处理能力。     

A novel approach to adaptive relational association rule mining

The paper focuses on the adaptive relational association rule mining problem. Relational association rules represent a particular type of association rules which describe frequent relations that occur between the features characterizing the instances within a data set. We aim at re-mining an object set, previously mined, when the feature set characterizing the objects increases. An adaptive relational association rule method, based on the discovery of interesting relational association rules, is proposed. This method, called ARARM (Adaptive Relational Association Rule Mining) adapts the set of rules that was established by mining the data before the feature set changed, preserving the completeness. We aim to reach the result more efficiently than running the mining algorithm again from scratch on the feature-extended object set. Experiments testing the method's performance on several case studies are also reported. The obtained results highlight the efficiency of the ARARM method and confirm the potential of our proposal.     

Demand-driven frequent itemset mining using pattern structures

Frequent itemset mining aims at discovering patterns the supports of which are beyond a given threshold. In many applications, including network event management systems, which motivated this work, patterns are composed of items each described by a subset of attributes of a relational table. As it involves an exponential mining space, the efficient implementation of user preferences and mining constraints becomes the first priority for a mining algorithm. User preferences and mining constraints are often expressed using patterns attribute structures. Unlike traditional methods that mine all frequent patterns indiscriminately, we regard frequent itemset mining as a two-step process: the mining of the pattern structures and the mining of patterns within each pattern structure. In this paper, we present a novel architecture that uses pattern structures to organize the mining space. In comparison with the previous techniques, the advantage of our approach is two-fold: (i) by exploiting the interrelationships among pattern structures, execution times for mining can be reduced significantly; and (ii) more importantly, it enables us to incorporate high-level simple user preferences and mining constraints into the mining process efficiently. These advantages are demonstrated by our experiments using both synthetic and real-life datasets.     

Modeling adiabatic temperature rise during concrete hydration: A data mining approach

This paper presents a data mining approach for modeling the adiabatic temperature rise during concrete hydration. The model was developed based on experimental data obtained in the last thirty years for several mass concrete constructions in Brazil, including some of the hugest hydroelectric power plants in operation in the world. The input of the model is a variable data set corresponding to the binder physical and chemical properties and concrete mixture proportions. The output is a set of three parameters that determine a function which is capable to describe the adiabatic temperature rise during concrete hydration. The comparison between experimental data and modeling results shows the accuracy of the proposed approach and that data mining is a potential tool to predict thermal stresses in the design of massive concrete structures.