3,436 research outputs found
Defining Interestigness for Association Rules
Interestingness in Association Rules has been a major topic of research in the past decade. The
reason is that the strength of association rules, i.e. its ability to discover ALL patterns given some thresholds
on support and confidence, is also its weakness. Indeed, a typical association rules analysis on real data often
results in hundreds or thousands of patterns creating a data mining problem of the second order. In other
words, it is not straightforward to determine which of those rules are interesting for the end-user. This paper
provides an overview of some existing measures of interestingness and we will comment on their properties.
In general, interestingness measures can be divided into objective and subjective measures. Objective
measures tend to express interestingness by means of statistical or mathematical criteria, whereas subjective
measures of interestingness aim at capturing more practical criteria that should be taken into account, such as
unexpectedness or actionability of rules. This paper only focusses on objective measures of interestingness
Modeling interestingness of streaming association rules as a benefit-maximizing classification problem
Cataloged from PDF version of article.In a typical application of association rule learning from market basket data, a set of transactions for a fixed period of time is used as input to rule learning algorithms. For example, the well-known Apriori algorithm can be applied to learn a set of association rules from such a transaction set. However, learning association rules from a set of transactions is not a one time only process. For example, a market manager may perform the association rule learning process once every month over the set of transactions collected through the last month. For this reason, we will consider the problem where transaction sets are input to the system as a stream of packages. The sets of transactions may come in varying sizes and in varying periods. Once a set of transactions arrive, the association rule learning algorithm is executed on the last set of transactions, resulting in new association rules. Therefore, the set of association rules learned will accumulate and increase in number over time, making the mining of interesting ones out of this enlarging set of association rules impractical for human experts. We refer to this sequence of rules as "association rule set stream" or "streaming association rules" and the main motivation behind this research is to develop a technique to overcome the interesting rule selection problem. A successful association rule mining system should select and present only the interesting rules to the domain experts. However, definition of interestingness of association rules on a given domain usually differs from one expert to another and also over time for a given expert. This paper proposes a post-processing method to learn a subjective model for the interestingness concept description of the streaming association rules. The uniqueness of the proposed method is its ability to formulate the interestingness issue of association rules as a benefit-maximizing classification problem and obtain a different interestingness model for each user. In this new classification scheme, the determining features are the selective objective interestingness factors related to the interestingness of the association rules, and the target feature is the interestingness label of those rules. The proposed method works incrementally and employs user interactivity at a certain level. It is evaluated on a real market dataset. The results show that the model can successfully select the interesting ones. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Analysis of monotonicity properties of some rule interestingness measures
One of the crucial problems in the field of knowledge discovery is development of good interestingness measures for evaluation of the discovered patterns. In this paper, we consider quantitative, objective interestingness measures for "if..., then... " association rules. We focus on three popular interestingness measures, namely rule interest function of Piatetsky-Shapiro, gain measure of Fukuda et al., and dependency factor used by Pawlak. We verify whether they satisfy the valuable property M of monotonic dependency on the number of objects satisfying or not the premise or the conclusion of a rule, and property of hypothesis symmetry (HS). Moreover, analytically and through experiments we show an interesting relationship between those measures and two other commonly used measures of rule support and anti-support
Combining Clustering techniques and Formal Concept Analysis to characterize Interestingness Measures
Formal Concept Analysis "FCA" is a data analysis method which enables to
discover hidden knowledge existing in data. A kind of hidden knowledge
extracted from data is association rules. Different quality measures were
reported in the literature to extract only relevant association rules. Given a
dataset, the choice of a good quality measure remains a challenging task for a
user. Given a quality measures evaluation matrix according to semantic
properties, this paper describes how FCA can highlight quality measures with
similar behavior in order to help the user during his choice. The aim of this
article is the discovery of Interestingness Measures "IM" clusters, able to
validate those found due to the hierarchical and partitioning clustering
methods "AHC" and "k-means". Then, based on the theoretical study of sixty one
interestingness measures according to nineteen properties, proposed in a recent
study, "FCA" describes several groups of measures.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure
Evaluation and optimization of frequent association rule based classification
Deriving useful and interesting rules from a data mining system is an essential and important task. Problems
such as the discovery of random and coincidental patterns or patterns with no significant values, and the
generation of a large volume of rules from a database commonly occur. Works on sustaining the interestingness
of rules generated by data mining algorithms are actively and constantly being examined and developed. In this
paper, a systematic way to evaluate the association rules discovered from frequent itemset mining algorithms,
combining common data mining and statistical interestingness measures, and outline an appropriated sequence of usage is presented. The experiments are performed using a number of real-world datasets that represent diverse characteristics of data/items, and detailed evaluation of rule sets is provided. Empirical results show that with a proper combination of data mining and statistical analysis, the framework is capable of eliminating a large number of non-significant, redundant and contradictive rules while preserving relatively valuable high accuracy and coverage rules when used in the classification problem. Moreover, the results reveal the important characteristics of mining frequent itemsets, and the impact of confidence measure for the classification task
Statistical strategies for pruning all the uninteresting association rules
We propose a general framework to describe formally the
problem of capturing the intensity of implication for
association rules through statistical metrics.
In this framework we present properties that influence the
interestingness of a rule, analyze the conditions that
lead a measure to perform a perfect prune at a time,
and define a final proper order to sort the surviving
rules. We will discuss why none of the currently employed
measures can capture objective interestingness, and
just the combination of some of them, in a multi-step fashion,
can be reliable. In contrast, we propose a new simple modification
of the Pearson coefficient that will meet all the necessary
requirements. We statistically infer the convenient cut-off
threshold for this new metric by empirically describing its
distribution function through simulation. Final experiments
serve to show the ability of our proposal.Postprint (published version
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
- âŠ