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Association Rule Mining
Association Rule Mining
❖ Market Basket Analysis is a modelling technique based upon the theory that if
you buy a certain group of items, you are more (or less) likely to buy another
group of items. For example, if you are in an English pub and you buy a pint of
beer and don't buy a bar meal, you are more likely to buy crisps (US. chips) at the
same time than somebody who didn't buy beer.
❖ The set of items a customer buys is referred to as an itemset, and market basket
analysis seeks to find relationships between purchases.
❖ Typically the relationship will be in the form of a rule:
➢ IF {beer, no bar meal} THEN {crisps}.
MARKET BASKET ANALYSIS
❖ The probability that a customer will buy beer without a bar meal (i.e. that the antecedent is
true) is referred to as the support for the rule. The conditional probability that a customer
will purchase crisps is referred to as the confidence.
❖ The algorithms for performing market basket analysis are fairly straightforward (Berry and
Linhoff is a reasonable introductory resource for this). The complexities mainly arise in
exploiting taxonomies, avoiding combinatorial explosions (a supermarket may stock
10,000 or more line items), and dealing with the large amounts of transaction data that may
be available.
❖ A major difficulty is that a large number of the rules found may be trivial for anyone
familiar with the business. Although the volume of data has been reduced, we are still
asking the user to find a needle in a haystack. Requiring rules to have a high minimum
support level and a high confidence level risks missing any exploitable result we might
have found.
MARKET BASKET ANALYSIS
EXAMPLE OF MARKET BASKET ANALYSIS
ASSOCIATION RULE MINING
❖ Association rule learning
is a rule-based machine
learning method for
discovering interesting
relations between variables
in large databases. It is
intended to identify strong
rules discovered in
databases using some
measures of
interestingness
ASSOCIATION RULE MINING
❖ Learning of Association rules is used to find relationships between attributes in
large databases. An association rule, A=> B, will be of the form” for a set of
transactions, some value of itemset A determines the values of itemset B under the
condition in which minimum support and confidence are met”.
❖ Support and Confidence can be represented by the following example:
❖ The above statement is an example of an association rule. This means that there is a 2%
transaction that bought bread and butter together and there are 60% of customers who bought
bread as well as butter.
ASSOCIATION RULE MINING
months not in years. Data Mining, also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases(KDD), to find
❖ Apriori algorithm is a classical algorithm in data mining. It is used for mining frequent itemsets and
relevant association rules. It is devised to operate on a database containing a lot of transactions, for
❖ It is very important for effective Market Basket Analysis and it helps the customers in purchasing their
items with more ease which increases the sales of the markets. It has also been used in the field of
healthcare for the detection of adverse drug reactions. It produces association rules that indicates what all
#1) In the first iteration of the algorithm, each item is taken as a 1-itemsets candidate. The algorithm will
count the occurrences of each item.
#2) Let there be some minimum support, min_sup ( eg 2). The set of 1 – itemsets whose occurrence is
satisfying the min sup are determined. Only those candidates which count more than or equal to min_sup,
are taken ahead for the next iteration and the others are pruned.
#3) Next, 2-itemset frequent items with min_sup are discovered. For this in the join step, the 2-itemset is
generated by forming a group of 2 by combining items with itself.
STEPS IN APRIORI ALGORITHM
#4) The 2-itemset candidates are pruned using min-sup threshold value. Now the table will have 2
–itemsets with min-sup only.
#5) The next iteration will form 3 –itemsets using join and prune step. This iteration will follow
antimonotone property where the subsets of 3-itemsets, that is the 2 –itemset subsets of each group
fall in min_sup. If all 2-itemset subsets are frequent then the superset will be frequent otherwise it
is pruned.
#6) Next step will follow making 4-itemset by joining 3-itemset with itself and pruning if its subset
does not meet the min_sup criteria. The algorithm is stopped when the most frequent itemset is
achieved.
Example of Apriori: Support threshold=50%, Confidence= 60%
6. Generate Association Rules: From the frequent itemset discovered above the association could be:
Confidence = support {I1, I2, I3} / support {I1, I2} = (3/ 4)* 100 = 75%
Confidence = support {I1, I2, I3} / support {I1, I3} = (3/ 3)* 100 = 100%
Confidence = support {I1, I2, I3} / support {I2, I3} = (3/ 4)* 100 = 75%
Confidence = support {I1, I2, I3} / support {I1} = (3/ 4)* 100 = 75%
Confidence = support {I1, I2, I3} / support {I3} = (3/ 4)* 100 = 75%
This shows that all the above association rules are strong if minimum confidence threshold is 60%.
PSEUDO CODE OF APRIORI ALGORITHM
Advantages
1. Easy to understand algorithm
2. Join and Prune steps are easy to implement on large itemsets in large databases
Disadvantages
1. It requires high computation if the itemsets are very large and the minimum
support is kept very low.
2. The entire database needs to be scanned.
IMPROVED APRIORI ALGORITHM
Many methods are available for improving the efficiency of the algorithm.
1. Hash-Based Technique: This method uses a hash-based structure called a hash table for generating
the k-itemsets and its corresponding count. It uses a hash function for generating the table.
2. Transaction Reduction: This method reduces the number of transactions scanning in iterations. The
transactions which do not contain frequent items are marked or removed.
3. Partitioning: This method requires only two database scans to mine the frequent itemsets. It says
that for any itemset to be potentially frequent in the database, it should be frequent in at least one of
the partitions of the database.
4. Sampling: This method picks a random sample S from Database D and then searches for frequent
itemset in S. It may be possible to lose a global frequent itemset. This can be reduced by lowering
the min_sup.
5. Dynamic Itemset Counting: This technique can add new candidate itemsets at any marked start
point of the database during the scanning of the database.
APPLICATION OF ALGORITHM
Some fields where Apriori is used:
#2) The second step is to construct the FP tree. For this, create the root of the tree. The root is represented by null.
#3) The next step is to scan the database again and examine the transactions. Examine the first transaction and find out
the itemset in it. The itemset with the max count is taken at the top, the next itemset with lower count and so on. It means
that the branch of the tree is constructed with transaction itemsets in descending order of count.
#4) The next transaction in the database is examined. The itemsets are ordered in descending order of count. If any
itemset of this transaction is already present in another branch (for example in the 1st transaction), then this transaction
branch would share a common prefix to the root.
This means that the common itemset is linked to the new node of another itemset in this transaction.
#5) Also, the count of the itemset is incremented as it occurs in the transactions. Both the common node
and new node count is increased by 1 as they are created and linked according to transactions.
#6) The next step is to mine the created FP Tree. For this, the lowest node is examined first along with the
links of the lowest nodes. The lowest node represents the frequency pattern length 1. From this, traverse
the path in the FP Tree. This path or paths are called a conditional pattern base.
Conditional pattern base is a sub-database consisting of prefix paths in the FP tree occurring with the
lowest node (suffix).
#7) Construct a Conditional FP Tree, which is formed by a count of itemsets in the path. The itemsets
meeting the threshold support are considered in the Conditional FP Tree.