Unit III (15 Hours)
Mining Association Rules: Basic Concepts – Single Dimensional Boolean Association Rules from
Transaction Databases, Multilevel Association Rules from transaction databases – Multi dimension
Association Rules from Relational Database and Data Warehouses.
Association rule mining finds interesting association or correlation
relationships among a large set of data items.
For example, the discovery of interesting association relationships
among huge amounts of business transaction records can help
catalog design, cross-marketing, loss- leader analysis, and other
business decision making processes.
A typical example of association rule mining is market basket analysis. This process
analyzes customer buying habits by finding associations between the different items that
customers place in their “shopping baskets" (Figure 6.1). The discovery of such associations
can help retailers develop marketing strategies by gaining insight into which items are
frequently purchased together by customers. For instance, if customers are buying milk, how
likely are they to also buy bread (and what kind of bread) on the same trip to the
supermarket? Such information can lead to increased sales by helping retailers to do
selective marketing and plan their shelf space. For instance, placing milk and bread within
close proximity may further encourage the sale of these items together within single visits to
the store.
Frequent patterns are patterns (e.g., itemsets, subsequences, or
substructures) that appear frequently in a data set. For example, a set of
items, such as milk and bread, that appear frequently together in a
transaction data set is a frequent itemset. A subsequence, such as buying
first a smartphone, then a smart TV, and then a smart home device, if it
occurs frequently in a shopping history database, is a (frequent)
sequential pattern. A substructure can refer to different structural forms,
such as subgraphs, subtrees, or sublattices. If a substructure occurs
frequently, it is called a (frequent) structured pattern. Finding frequent
patterns plays an essential role in mining associations, correlations, and
many other interesting relationships among data. Moreover, it helps in
data classification, clustering, and other data mining tasks.