Association Mining to Correlation Analysis

Association Mining to Correlation Analysis

Most association rule mining algorithms employ a support-confidence framework. Often, many interesting rules can be found using low support thresholds. Although minimum support and confidence thresholds help weed out or exclude the exploration of a good number of uninteresting rules, many rules so generated are still not interesting to the users

1)Strong Rules Are Not Necessarily Interesting: An Example

Whether or not a rule is interesting can be assessed either subjectively or objectively. Ultimately, only the user can judge if a given rule is interesting, and this judgment, being subjective, may differ from one user to another. However, objective interestingness measures, based on the statistics ―behind‖ the data, can be used as one step toward the goal of weeding out uninteresting rules from presentation to the user.

The support and confidence measures are insufficient at filtering out uninteresting association rules. To tackle this weakness, a correlation measure can be used to augment the support-confidence framework for association rules. This leads to correlation rules of the form

That is, a correlation rule is measured not only by its support and confidence but also by the correlation between itemsets A and B. There are many different correlation measures from which to choose. In this section, we study various correlation measures to determine which would be good for mining large data sets.