Mining Temporal Association Rules with Temporal Soft Sets

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 11301415), the Shaanxi Provincial Key Research and Development Program (grant no. 2021SF-480), and the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (grant no. 2018JM1054).Traditional association rule extraction may run into some difficulties due to ignoring the temporal aspect of the collected data. Particularly, it happens in many cases that some item sets are frequent during specific time periods, although they are not frequent in the whole data set. In this study, we make an effort to enhance conventional rule mining by introducing temporal soft sets. We define temporal granulation mappings to induce granular structures for temporal transaction data. Using this notion, we define temporal soft sets and their Q-clip soft sets to establish a novel framework for mining temporal association rules. A number of useful characterizations and results are obtained, including a necessary and sufficient condition for fast identification of strong temporal association rules. By combining temporal soft sets with NegNodeset-based frequent item set mining techniques, we develop the negFIN-based soft temporal association rule mining (negFIN-STARM) method to extract strong temporal association rules. Numerical experiments are conducted on commonly used data sets to show the feasibility of our approach. Moreover, comparative analysis demonstrates that the newly proposed method achieves higher execution efficiency than three well-known approaches in the literature.National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 11301415Shaanxi Provincial Key Research and Development Program 2021SF-480Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China 2018JM105

Web Usage Mining with Evolutionary Extraction of Temporal Fuzzy Association Rules

In Web usage mining, fuzzy association rules that have a temporal property can provide useful knowledge about when associations occur. However, there is a problem with traditional temporal fuzzy association rule mining algorithms. Some rules occur at the intersection of fuzzy sets' boundaries where there is less support (lower membership), so the rules are lost. A genetic algorithm (GA)-based solution is described that uses the flexible nature of the 2-tuple linguistic representation to discover rules that occur at the intersection of fuzzy set boundaries. The GA-based approach is enhanced from previous work by including a graph representation and an improved fitness function. A comparison of the GA-based approach with a traditional approach on real-world Web log data discovered rules that were lost with the traditional approach. The GA-based approach is recommended as complementary to existing algorithms, because it discovers extra rules. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Evolving temporal fuzzy association rules from quantitative data with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

A novel method for mining association rules that are both quantitative and temporal using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is presented. This method successfully identifies numerous temporal association rules that occur more frequently in areas of a dataset with specific quantitative values represented with fuzzy sets. The novelty of this research lies in exploring the composition of quantitative and temporal fuzzy association rules and the approach of using a hybridisation of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm with fuzzy sets. Results show the ability of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (NSGA-II) to evolve multiple target itemsets that have been augmented into synthetic datasets

Temporal fuzzy association rule mining with 2-tuple linguistic representation

This paper reports on an approach that contributes towards the problem of discovering fuzzy association rules that exhibit a temporal pattern. The novel application of the 2-tuple linguistic representation identifies fuzzy association rules in a temporal context, whilst maintaining the interpretability of linguistic terms. Iterative Rule Learning (IRL) with a Genetic Algorithm (GA) simultaneously induces rules and tunes the membership functions. The discovered rules were compared with those from a traditional method of discovering fuzzy association rules and results demonstrate how the traditional method can loose information because rules occur at the intersection of membership function boundaries. New information can be mined from the proposed approach by improving upon rules discovered with the traditional method and by discovering new rules