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10 Association analysis The detection of association rules is another descriptive method which is very popular in data mining, especially in such areas as web mining, where it is used to analyse the pages visited by a web user, and the retail industry, where it can analyse the products bought by a customer on a single visit. This explains the alternative name for this method: market basket analysis. Of course, this method can be usefully applied to other activities as well. It does not have the same theoretical difficulties as clustering and classification methods; instead, the difficulties arise from the need to process enormous volumes of data (up to several million till receipts, for example) and to pick out new and interesting associations from the overwhelming majority of irrelevant or previously known associations. 10.1 Principles Finding association rules is a matter of finding rules of the following type: ‘If, for any one individual, variable A ¼ x , variable B ¼ x , and so on, then, in 80% of cases, variable Z ¼ x , A B Z and this configuration is found for 20% of the individuals.’ In other words, the aim is to find the most frequent combined values of a set of variables of a data set. In market basket analysis, the variables are the indicators of the products, and the rules are applied to indicators equal to 1, in other words the products bought. Note that some recent research has been carried out on ‘negative’ rules, where we are interested in the products that are not bought. The value of 80% is called the index of confidence and the value of 20% is called the support index of the rule {A ¼ xA , B ¼ xB, . . .} ) {Z ¼ xZ }. The first part of the rule is called the ‘antecedent’ or ‘condition’; the second part is called the ‘consequent’ or ‘result’; and expressions of the form {A ¼ xA } are called ‘items’. In an associ