Enhancing Fuzzy Associative Rule Mining Approaches for Improving Prediction Accuracy. Integration of Fuzzy Clustering, Apriori and Multiple Support Approaches to Develop an Associative Classification Rule Base

Building an accurate and reliable model for prediction for different application domains, is one of the most significant challenges in knowledge discovery and data mining. This thesis focuses on building and enhancing a generic predictive model for estimating a future value by extracting association rules (knowledge) from a quantitative database. This model is applied to several data sets obtained from different benchmark problems, and the results are evaluated through extensive experimental tests. The thesis presents an incremental development process for the prediction model with three stages. Firstly, a Knowledge Discovery (KD) model is proposed by integrating Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) with Apriori approach to extract Fuzzy Association Rules (FARs) from a database for building a Knowledge Base (KB) to predict a future value. The KD model has been tested with two road-traffic data sets. Secondly, the initial model has been further developed by including a diversification method in order to improve a reliable FARs to find out the best and representative rules. The resulting Diverse Fuzzy Rule Base (DFRB) maintains high quality and diverse FARs offering a more reliable and generic model. The model uses FCM to transform quantitative data into fuzzy ones, while a Multiple Support Apriori (MSapriori) algorithm is adapted to extract the FARs from fuzzy data. The correlation values for these FARs are calculated, and an efficient orientation for filtering FARs is performed as a post-processing method. The FARs diversity is maintained through the clustering of FARs, based on the concept of the sharing function technique used in multi-objectives optimization. The best and the most diverse FARs are obtained as the DFRB to utilise within the Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) for prediction. The third stage of development proposes a hybrid prediction model called Fuzzy Associative Classification Rule Mining (FACRM) model. This model integrates the ii improved Gustafson-Kessel (G-K) algorithm, the proposed Fuzzy Associative Classification Rules (FACR) algorithm and the proposed diversification method. The improved G-K algorithm transforms quantitative data into fuzzy data, while the FACR generate significant rules (Fuzzy Classification Association Rules (FCARs)) by employing the improved multiple support threshold, associative classification and vertical scanning format approaches. These FCARs are then filtered by calculating the correlation value and the distance between them. The advantage of the proposed FACRM model is to build a generalized prediction model, able to deal with different application domains. The validation of the FACRM model is conducted using different benchmark data sets from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) of machine learning and KEEL (Knowledge Extraction based on Evolutionary Learning) repositories, and the results of the proposed FACRM are also compared with other existing prediction models. The experimental results show that the error rate and generalization performance of the proposed model is better in the majority of data sets with respect to the commonly used models. A new method for feature selection entitled Weighting Feature Selection (WFS) is also proposed. The WFS method aims to improve the performance of FACRM model. The prediction performance is improved by minimizing the prediction error and reducing the number of generated rules. The prediction results of FACRM by employing WFS have been compared with that of FACRM and Stepwise Regression (SR) models for different data sets. The performance analysis and comparative study show that the proposed prediction model provides an effective approach that can be used within a decision support system.Applied Science University (ASU) of Jorda

A survey on utilization of data mining approaches for dermatological (skin) diseases prediction

Due to recent technology advances, large volumes of medical data is obtained. These data contain valuable information. Therefore data mining techniques can be used to extract useful patterns. This paper is intended to introduce data mining and its various techniques and a survey of the available literature on medical data mining. We emphasize mainly on the application of data mining on skin diseases. A categorization has been provided based on the different data mining techniques. The utility of the various data mining methodologies is highlighted. Generally association mining is suitable for extracting rules. It has been used especially in cancer diagnosis. Classification is a robust method in medical mining. In this paper, we have summarized the different uses of classification in dermatology. It is one of the most important methods for diagnosis of erythemato-squamous diseases. There are different methods like Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and fuzzy classifiaction in this topic. Clustering is a useful method in medical images mining. The purpose of clustering techniques is to find a structure for the given data by finding similarities between data according to data characteristics. Clustering has some applications in dermatology. Besides introducing different mining methods, we have investigated some challenges which exist in mining skin data

A model for mobile content filtering on non-interactive recommendation systems

To overcome the problem of information overloading in mobile communication, a recommendation system can be used to help mobile device users. However, there are problems relating to sparsity of information from a first-time user in regard to initial rating of the content and the retrieval of relevant items. In order for the user to experience personalized content delivery via the mobile recommendation system, content filtering is necessary. This paper proposes an integrated method by using classification and association rule techniques for extracting knowledge from mobile content in a user's profile. The knowledge can be used to establish a model for new users and first rater on mobile content. The model recommends relevant content in the early stage during the connection based on the user's profile. The proposed method also facilitates association to be generated to link the first rater items to the top items identified from the outcomes of the classification and clustering processes. This can address the problem of sparsity in initial rating and new user's connection for non-interactive recommendation systems

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

Text Classification Using Association Rules, Dependency Pruning and Hyperonymization

We present new methods for pruning and enhancing item- sets for text classification via association rule mining. Pruning methods are based on dependency syntax and enhancing methods are based on replacing words by their hyperonyms of various orders. We discuss the impact of these methods, compared to pruning based on tfidf rank of words.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, presented at DMNLP 201