AssociationRuleMininganditsApplicationtoMPIS.docVIP

PAGE 3 PAGE 8 Association Rule Mining and its Application to MPIS Raymond Chi-Wing Wong, Ada Wai-Chee Fu The Chinese University of Hong Kong INTRODUCTION Association rule mining (Agrawal, Imilienski and Swami, 1993) has been proposed for understanding the relationships among items in transactions or market baskets. For instance, if a customer buys butter, what is the chance that he/she buys bread at the same time? Such information may be useful for decision makers to determine strategies in a store. More formally, given a set I = {I1, I2,…, In} of items (e.g. carrot, orange and knife, in a supermarket). The database contains a number of transactions. Each transaction t is a binary vector with t[k]=1 if t bought item Ik and t[k]=0 otherwise(e.g. {1, 0, 0, 1, 0}). An association rule is of the form X ?Ij, where X is a set of some items in I, and Ij is a single item not in X (e.g. {Orange, Knife} ? Plate). A transaction t satisfies X if for all items Ik in X, t[k] = 1. The support for a rule X?Ij is the fraction of transactions that satisfy the union of X and Ij. A rule X ? Ij has confidence c% if and only if c% of transactions that satisfy X also satisfy Ij. The mining process of association rule can be divided into two steps. Frequent Itemset Generation: generate all sets of items that have support greater than a certain threshold, called minsupport Association Rule Generation: from the frequent itemsets, generate all association rules that have confidence greater than a certain threshold called minconfidence Step 1 is much more difficult compared with Step 2. Thus, researchers (Agrawal, Imilienski Swamin, 1993; Han, Pei Yin, 2000; Han, Wang, Lu and Tzvetkov, 2002; Liu, Pan, Wang Han, 2002; Fu, Kwong Tang, 2000) have focused on the studies of frequent itemset generation. Different algorithms have been proposed for finding frequent itemsets. The Apriori Algorithm is a well-known approach which is proposed by Agrawal Srikant (1994). It is an iterative app