A robustness measure of association rules

Abstract

We propose a formal definition of the robustness of association rules for interestingness measures. It is a central concept in the evaluation of the rules and has only been studied unsatisfactorily up to now. It is crucial because a good rule (according to a given quality measure) might turn out as a very fragile rule with respect to small variations in the data. The robustness measure that we propose here is based on a model we proposed in a previous work. It depends on the selected quality measure, the value taken by the rule and the minimal acceptance threshold chosen by the user. We present a few properties of this robustness, detail its use in practice and show the outcomes of various experiments. Furthermore, we compare our results to classical tools of statistical analysis of association rules. All in all, we present a new perspective on the evaluation of association rules. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.