Mining quantitative association rules on overlapped intervals

Abstract

Mining association rules is an important problem in data mining. Algorithms for mining boolean data have been well studied and documented, but they cannot deal with quantitative and categorical data directly. For quantitative attributes, the general idea is partitioning the domain of a quantitative attribute into intervals, and applying boolean algorithms to the intervals. But, there is a conflict between the minimum support problem and the minimum confidence problem, while existing partitioning methods cannot avoid the conflict. Moreover, we expect the intervals to be meaningful. Clustering in data mining is a discovery process which groups a set of data such that the intracluster similarity is maximized and the intercluster similarity is minimized. The discovered clusters are used to explain the characteristics of the data distribution. The present paper will propose a novel method to find quantitative association rules by clustering the transactions of a database into clusters and projecting the clusters into the domains of the quantitative attributes to form meaningful intervals which may be overlapped. Experimental results show that our approach can efficiently find quantitative association rules, and can find important association rules which may be missed by the previous algorithms. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.