628 research outputs found
Testing Interestingness Measures in Practice: A Large-Scale Analysis of Buying Patterns
Understanding customer buying patterns is of great interest to the retail
industry and has shown to benefit a wide variety of goals ranging from managing
stocks to implementing loyalty programs. Association rule mining is a common
technique for extracting correlations such as "people in the South of France
buy ros\'e wine" or "customers who buy pat\'e also buy salted butter and sour
bread." Unfortunately, sifting through a high number of buying patterns is not
useful in practice, because of the predominance of popular products in the top
rules. As a result, a number of "interestingness" measures (over 30) have been
proposed to rank rules. However, there is no agreement on which measures are
more appropriate for retail data. Moreover, since pattern mining algorithms
output thousands of association rules for each product, the ability for an
analyst to rely on ranking measures to identify the most interesting ones is
crucial. In this paper, we develop CAPA (Comparative Analysis of PAtterns), a
framework that provides analysts with the ability to compare the outcome of
interestingness measures applied to buying patterns in the retail industry. We
report on how we used CAPA to compare 34 measures applied to over 1,800 stores
of Intermarch\'e, one of the largest food retailers in France
An efficient closed frequent itemset miner for the MOA stream mining system
Mining itemsets is a central task in data mining, both in the batch and the streaming paradigms. While robust, efficient, and well-tested implementations exist for batch mining, hardly any publicly available equivalent exists for the streaming scenario. The lack of an efficient, usable tool for the task hinders its use by practitioners and makes it difficult to assess new research in the area. To alleviate this situation, we review the algorithms described in the literature, and implement and evaluate the IncMine algorithm by Cheng, Ke, and Ng (2008) for mining frequent closed itemsets from data streams. Our implementation works on top of the MOA (Massive Online Analysis) stream mining framework to ease its use and integration with other stream mining tasks. We provide a PAC-style rigorous analysis of the quality of the output of IncMine as a function of its parameters; this type of analysis is rare in pattern mining algorithms. As a by-product, the analysis shows how one of the user-provided parameters in the original description can be removed entirely while retaining the performance guarantees. Finally, we experimentally confirm both on synthetic and real data the excellent performance of the algorithm, as reported in the original paper, and its ability to handle concept drift.Postprint (published version
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