Mining inter-transaction associations with templates

Abstract

Multi-dimensional, inter-transaction association rules extend the traditional association rules to describe more general associations among items with multiple properties cross transactions. `After McDonald and Burger King open branches, KFC will open a branch two months later and one mile away' is an example of such rules. Since the number of potential inter-transaction association rules tends to be extremely large, mining inter-transaction associations poses more challenges on efficient processing than mining intra-transaction associations. In order to make such association mining truly practical and computationally tractable, in this study, we present a template model to help users declare the interesting inter-transaction associations to be mined. With the guidance of templates, several optimization techniques are devised to speed up the discovery of inter-transaction association rules. We show, through a series of experiments, that these optimization techniques can yield significant performance benefits.