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Chapter: Data Warehousing and Data Mining : Association Rule Mining and Classification

Mining Various Kinds of Association Rules

For many applications, it is difficult to find strong associations among data items at low or primitive levels of abstraction due to the sparsity of data at those levels. Strong associations discovered at high levels of abstraction may represent commonsense knowledge.

Mining Various Kinds of Association Rules

 

1. Mining Multilevel Association Rules

For many applications, it is difficult to find strong associations among data items at low or primitive levels of abstraction due to the sparsity of data at those levels. Strong associations discovered at high levels of abstraction may represent commonsense knowledge.

 

. Therefore, data mining systems should provide capabilities for mining association rules at multiple levels of abstraction, with sufficient flexibility for easy traversal among different abstraction spaces.

 

Let’s examine the following example.

 

Mining multilevel association rules. Suppose we are given the task-relevant set of transactional data in Table for sales in an AllElectronics store, showing the items purchased for each transaction.

 

The concept hierarchy for the items is shown in Figure . A concept hierarchy defines a sequence of mappings from a set of low-level concepts to higher level, more general concepts. Data can be generalized by replacing low-level concepts within the data by their higher-level concepts, or ancestors, from a concept hierarchy.



Association rules generated from mining data at multiple levels of abstraction are called multiple-level or multilevel association rules. Multilevel association rules can be mined efficiently using concept hierarchies under a support-confidence framework. In general, a top-down strategy is employed, For each level, any algorithm for discovering frequent itemsets may be used, such as Apriori or its variations.

 

Using uniform minimum support for all levels (referred to as uniform support): The same minimum support threshold is used when mining at each level of abstraction. For example, in Figure 5.11, a minimum support threshold of 5% is used throughout (e.g., for mining from

 

“computer” down to “laptop computer”). Both “computer” and “laptop computer” are found to be frequent, while “desktop computer” is not.

 

When a uniform minimum support threshold is used, the search procedure is simplified. The method is also simple in that users are required to specify only one minimum support threshold. An Apriori-like optimization technique can be adopted, based on the knowledge that an ancestor is a superset of its descendants: The search avoids examining itemsets containing any item whose ancestors do not have minimum support.


Using reduced minimum support at lower levels (referred to as reduced support): Each level of abstraction has its own minimum support threshold. The deeper the level of abstraction, the smaller the corresponding threshold is. For example, in Figure, the minimum support thresholds for levels 1 and 2 are 5% and 3%, respectively. In this way, “computer,” “laptop computer,” and “desktop computer” are all considered frequent.

 

Using item or group-based minimum support (referred to as group-based support):

 

Because users or experts often have insight as to which groups are more important than others, it is sometimes more desirable to set up user-specific, item, or group based minimal support thresholds when mining multilevel rules. For example, a user could set up the minimum support thresholds based on product price, or on items of interest, such as by setting particularly low support thresholds for laptop computers and flash drives in order to pay particular attention to the association patterns containing items in these categories.

 

 

2. Mining Multidimensional Association Rules from Relational Databases and Data Warehouses

 

 

We have studied association rules that imply a single predicate, that is, the predicate buys. For instance, in mining our AllElectronics database, we may discover the Boolean association rule


Following the terminology used in multidimensional databases, we refer to each distinct predicate in a rule as a dimension. Hence, we can refer to Rule above as a single dimensional or intra dimensional association rule because it contains a single distinct predicate (e.g., buys)with multiple occurrences (i.e., the predicate occurs more than once within the rule). As we have seen in the previous sections of this chapter, such rules are commonly mined from transactional data.

 

Considering each database attribute or warehouse dimension as a predicate, we can therefore mine association rules containing multiple predicates, such as


Association rules that involve two or more dimensions or predicates can be referred to as multidimensional association rules. Rule above contains three predicates (age, occupation, and buys), each of which occurs only once in the rule. Hence, we say that it has no repeated predicates. Multidimensional association rules with no repeated predicates are called inter dimensional association rules. We can also mine multidimensional association rules with repeated predicates, which contain multiple occurrences of some predicates. These rules are called hybrid-dimensional association rules. An example of such a rule is the following, where the predicate buys is repeated:


 

Note that database attributes can be categorical or quantitative. Categorical attributes have a finite number of possible values, with no ordering among the values (e.g., occupation, brand, color). Categorical attributes are also called nominal attributes, because their values are ―names of things.‖ Quantitative attributes are numeric and have an implicit ordering among values (e.g., age, income, price). Techniques for mining multidimensional association rules can be categorized into two basic approaches regarding the treatment of quantitative attributes.

 

Mining Multidimensional Association Rules Using Static Discretization of Quantitative

 

Attributes

 

Quantitative attributes, in this case, are discretized before mining using predefined concept hierarchies or data discretization techniques, where numeric values are replaced by interval labels. Categorical attributes may also be generalized to higher conceptual levels if desired. If the resulting task-relevant data are stored in a relational table, then any of the frequent itemset mining algorithms we have discussed can be modified easily so as to find all frequent predicate sets rather than frequent itemsets. In particular, instead of searching on only one attribute like buys, we need to search through all of the relevant attributes, treating each attribute-value pair as an itemset.


 

Mining Quantitative Association Rules

 

 

 

Quantitative association rules are multidimensional association rules in which the numeric attributes are dynamically discretized during the mining process so as to satisfy some mining criteria, such as maximizing the confidence or compactness of the rules mined. In this section, we focus specifically on how to mine quantitative association rules having two quantitative attributes on the left-hand side of the rule and one categorical attribute on the right-hand side of the rule. That is,


where Aquan1 and Aquan2 are tests on quantitative attribute intervals (where the intervals are dynamically determined), and Acat tests a categorical attribute from the task-relevant data. Such rules have been referred to as two-dimensional quantitative association rules, because they contain two quantitative dimensions. For instance, suppose you are curious about the association relationship between pairs of quantitative attributes, like customer age and income, and the type of television (such as high-definition TV, i.e., HDTV) that customers like to buy. An example of such a 2-D quantitative association rule is


Binning: Quantitative attributes can have a very wide range of values defining their domain. Just think about how big a 2-D grid would be if we plotted age and income as axes, where each possible value of age was assigned a unique position on one axis, and similarly, each possible value of income was assigned a unique position on the other axis! To keep grids down to a manageable size, we instead partition the ranges of quantitative attributes into intervals. These intervals are dynamic in that they may later be further combined during the mining process. The partitioning process is referred to as binning, that is, where the intervals are considered ―bins.‖ Three common binning strategies area as follows:


Finding frequent predicate sets: Once the 2-D array containing the count distribution for each category is set up, it can be scanned to find the frequent predicate sets (those satisfying minimum support) that also satisfy minimum confidence. Strong association rules can then be generated from these predicate sets, using a rule generation algorithm.





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