Algorithms for association rule mining — a general survey and comparison

Abstract

Today there are several efficient algorithms that cope with the popular and computationally expensive task of associ- ation rule mining. Actually, these algorithms are more or less described on their own. In this paper we explain the fundamentals of association rule mining and moreover de- rive a general framework. Based on this we describe to- day's approaches in context by pointing out common aspects and differences. After that we thoroughly investigate their strengths and weaknesses and carry out several runtime ex- periments. It turns out that the runtime behavior of the algorithms is much more similar as to be expected.