Encapsulation of Soft Computing Approaches within Itemset Mining a A Survey

Data Mining discovers patterns and trends by extracting knowledge from large databases. Soft Computing techniques such as fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, rough sets, etc. aims to reveal the tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty for achieving tractability, robustness and low-cost solutions. Fuzzy Logic and Rough sets are suitable for handling different types of uncertainty. Neural networks provide good learning and generalization. Genetic algorithms provide efficient search algorithms for selecting a model, from mixed media data. Data mining refers to information extraction while soft computing is used for information processing. For effective knowledge discovery from large databases, both Soft Computing and Data Mining can be merged. Association rule mining (ARM) and Itemset mining focus on finding most frequent item sets and corresponding association rules, extracting rare itemsets including temporal and fuzzy concepts in discovered patterns. This survey paper explores the usage of soft computing approaches in itemset utility mining

A sliding windows based dual support framework for discovering emerging trends from temporal data

In this paper we present the dual support Apriori for temporal data (DSAT) algorithm. This is a novel technique for discovering jumping and emerging patterns (JEPs) from time series data using a sliding window technique. Our approach is particularly effective when performing trend analysis in order to explore the itemset variations over time. Our proposed framework is different from the previous work on JEP in that we do not rely on itemsets borders with a constrained search space. DSAT exploits previously mined time stamped data by using a sliding window concept, thus requiring less memory, minimum computational cost and very low dataset accesses. DSAT discovers all JEPs, as in “naïve” approaches, but utilises less memory and scales linearly with large datasets sets as demonstrated in the experimental section

A framework for trend mining with application to medical data

This thesis presents research work conducted in the field of knowledge discovery. It presents an integrated trend-mining framework and SOMA, which is the application of the trend-mining framework in diabetic retinopathy data. Trend mining is the process of identifying and analysing trends in the context of the variation of support of the association/classification rules that have been extracted from longitudinal datasets. The integrated framework concerns all major processes from data preparation to the extraction of knowledge. At the pre-process stage, data are cleaned, transformed if necessary, and sorted into time-stamped datasets using logic rules. At the next stage, time-stamp datasets are passed through the main processing, in which the ARM technique of matrix algorithm is applied to identify frequent rules with acceptable confidence. Mathematical conditions are applied to classify the sequences of support values into trends. Afterwards, interestingness criteria are applied to obtain interesting knowledge, and a visualization technique is proposed that maps how objects are moving from the previous to the next time stamp. A validation and verification (external and internal validation) framework is described that aims to ensure that the results at the intermediate stages of the framework are correct and that the framework as a whole can yield results that demonstrate causality. To evaluate the thesis, SOMA was developed. The dataset is, in itself, also of interest, as it is very noisy (in common with other similar medical datasets) and does not feature a clear association between specific time stamps and subsets of the data. The Royal Liverpool University Hospital has been a major centre for retinopathy research since 1991. Retinopathy is a generic term used to describe damage to the retina of the eye, which can, in the long term, lead to visual loss. Diabetic retinopathy is used to evaluate the framework, to determine whether SOMA can extract knowledge that is already known to the medics. The results show that those datasets can be used to extract knowledge that can show causality between patients’ characteristics such as the age of patient at diagnosis, type of diabetes, duration of diabetes, and diabetic retinopathy