831 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
Towards a semantic and statistical selection of association rules
The increasing growth of databases raises an urgent need for more accurate
methods to better understand the stored data. In this scope, association rules
were extensively used for the analysis and the comprehension of huge amounts of
data. However, the number of generated rules is too large to be efficiently
analyzed and explored in any further process. Association rules selection is a
classical topic to address this issue, yet, new innovated approaches are
required in order to provide help to decision makers. Hence, many interesting-
ness measures have been defined to statistically evaluate and filter the
association rules. However, these measures present two major problems. On the
one hand, they do not allow eliminating irrelevant rules, on the other hand,
their abun- dance leads to the heterogeneity of the evaluation results which
leads to confusion in decision making. In this paper, we propose a two-winged
approach to select statistically in- teresting and semantically incomparable
rules. Our statis- tical selection helps discovering interesting association
rules without favoring or excluding any measure. The semantic comparability
helps to decide if the considered association rules are semantically related
i.e comparable. The outcomes of our experiments on real datasets show promising
results in terms of reduction in the number of rules
Subjectively Interesting Subgroup Discovery on Real-valued Targets
Deriving insights from high-dimensional data is one of the core problems in
data mining. The difficulty mainly stems from the fact that there are
exponentially many variable combinations to potentially consider, and there are
infinitely many if we consider weighted combinations, even for linear
combinations. Hence, an obvious question is whether we can automate the search
for interesting patterns and visualizations. In this paper, we consider the
setting where a user wants to learn as efficiently as possible about
real-valued attributes. For example, to understand the distribution of crime
rates in different geographic areas in terms of other (numerical, ordinal
and/or categorical) variables that describe the areas. We introduce a method to
find subgroups in the data that are maximally informative (in the formal
Information Theoretic sense) with respect to a single or set of real-valued
target attributes. The subgroup descriptions are in terms of a succinct set of
arbitrarily-typed other attributes. The approach is based on the Subjective
Interestingness framework FORSIED to enable the use of prior knowledge when
finding most informative non-redundant patterns, and hence the method also
supports iterative data mining.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables, conference submissio
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