Mining indirect positive and negative association rules

Abstract

Indirect association is a new kind of infrequent pattern, which provides a new way for interpreting the value of infrequent patterns and can effectively reduce the number of uninteresting infrequent patterns. The concept of indirect association is to "indirectly" connect two rarely co-occurred items via a frequent itemset called mediator, and if appropriately utilized it can help to identify real interesting "infrequent itempairs" from databases. Indirect association rule is said to be positive (Negative) if mediator set contains presence (presence or absence) of items. Existing indirect association mining methods mine positive mediator sets. To the best of our knowledge, no research work has been conducted on mining indirect negative associations. In this paper, we propose an approach for mining indirect negative associations. The proposed method can discover all positive and negative indirect association between itemsets. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.