Association rules and Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence

Abstract

The standard definitions of confidence for association rules was proposed by Agrawal et al. based on the idea that co-occurrences of items in one transaction are evidence for association between the items. Since such definition of confidence is nothing but a conditional probability, even weights are a priori assigned to each transaction that contains the items in question at the same time. All of such transactions, however, do not necessarily give us such evidence because some co-occurrences might be contingent. Thus the D-S theory is introduced to discuss how each transaction is estimated as evidence. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.