A graph-based clustering approach to evaluate interestingness measures: A tool and a comparative study

Abstract

Finding interestingness measures to evaluate association rules has become an important knowledge quality issue in KDD. Many interestingness measures may be found in the literature, and many authors have discussed and compared interestingness properties in order to improve the choice of the most suitable measures for a given application. As interestingness depends both on the data structure and on the decision-maker's goals, some measures may be relevant in some context, but not in others. Therefore, it is necessary to design new contextual approaches in order to help the decision-maker select the most suitable interestingness measures. In this paper, we present a new approach implemented by a new tool, ARQAT, for making comparisons. The approach is based on the analysis of a correlation graph presenting the clustering of objective interestingness measures and reflecting the post-processing of association rules. This graph-based clustering approach is used to compare and discuss the behavior of thirty-six interestingness measures on two prototypical and opposite datasets: a highly correlated one and a lowly correlated one. We focus on the discovery of the stable clusters obtained from the data analyzed between these thirty-six measures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.