See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/279923590

Trends in Quantitative Association Rule Mining Techniques

Conference Paper · July 2015

DOI: 10.1109/ReTIS.2015.7232865

CITATIONS READS
19 2,406

2 authors:

Dhrubajit Adhikary Swarup Roy

North Eastern Hill University Sikkim University
6 PUBLICATIONS 31 CITATIONS 129 PUBLICATIONS 835 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Swarup Roy on 11 July 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 2015 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Systems (ReTIS)
Trends in Quantitative Association Rule Mining
Techniques
Dhrubajit Adhikary1 , Swarup Roy2∗
Department of Information Technology
North Eastern Hill University, Shillong - 793 022
Email: 1 dhrubajit.adhikary@gmail.com, 2 swarup@nehu.ac.in
Abstract—Association rule mining (ARM) techniques are ef-
fective in extracting frequent patterns and hidden associations
among data items in various databases. These techniques are
widely used for learning behavior, predicting events and making
decisions at various levels. The conventional ARM techniques
are however limited to databases comprising categorical data
only whereas the real-world databases mostly in business and
scientific domains have attributes containing quantitative data.
Therefore, an improvised methodology called Quantitative As-
sociation Rule Mining (QARM) is used that helps discovering
hidden associations from the real-world quantitative databases.
In this paper, we present an exhaustive discussion on the trends
in QARM research and further make a systematic classification
of the available techniques into different categories based on
the type of computational methods they adopted. We perform a
critical analysis of various methods proposed so far and present
a theoretical comparative study among them. We also enumerate
some of the issues that needs to be addressed in future research.
Index Terms—Association Rules; Quantitative Association
Rules; Clustering; Fuzzy; Evolutionary approach; Information
theory.
I. I NTRODUCTION
With the passage of time and advances in technology,
the nature and volume of data changed remarkably. Due
to numerous information sensing and information gathering
devices and techniques, the modern databases are no more
alike the market-basket databases where classical association
rule mining techniques can be applied. Most modern databases
(in domains like business, health-care, stock-market, bioinfor-
matics etc.) are larger in size, dimensions and contain attributes
that are quantitative in nature. Therefore, to handle quanti-
tative data and mine meaningful association rules in multi-
dimensional quantitative databases better ARM techniques
became a necessity. Henceforth, the concept of Quantitative
Association Rule Mining was coined. Then onwards a good
number of QARM techniques has been proposed in recent
decades. These techniques follow different trends w.r.t. time
and need, and have their own advantages and limitations when
applied in different quantitative databases.
In this paper, we try to articulate various trends followed
in QARM research since the inception of the concept in the
pioneering work by R. Srikant et al. [1]. We present a com-
prehensive study of various QARM approaches and analyze
a few techniques from each one of them. To begin with, we
978-1-4799-8349-0/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 126
discuss the background of ARM and QARM techniques in the
following section.
II. BACKGROUND
An explicit definition of the ARM problem was given by
Agrawal et al. [2]. From the perspective of analyzing market-
basket data; for a set of items I = {I1 , I2 , I3 , ....., Im } and
a database of transactions D = {t1 , t2 , t3 , ...., tn } where
each transaction ti ⊆ I ; the ARM problem is to identify
all interesting Association Rules (AR) of the form X⇒Y
where X ⊂ I, Y ⊂ I are actually the non-empty frequent-
itemsets and X ∩ Y = φ. All such AR, satisfying either or
both the two thresholds of rule interestingness viz. minimum
support and minimum confidence; are considered relevant and
informative [3]. Support of an association rule is calculated
as the percentage of records containing X ∪ Y to the total
number of records in the database. Confidence is the strength
of the implication in a rule; it is calculated as the percentage
of records that contain Y if they contain X.
QARM is an improvised form of association rule mining
applied to databases containing both quantitative and categor-
ical attributes. Alike as an AR, a Quantitative Association Rule
(QAR) is formally an implication of the form X ⇒ Y. The left
side of the implication is called antecedent and the right side is
called succedent (also, consequent). Both these cedents (also
called attribute sets) may be comprised of a single attribute
trivial cedent, or multiple attributes non-trivial cedent. Unlike
a conventional AR, in a QAR both quantitative and categorical
attributes may participate as any of the cedents and the
common measures of rule interestingness i.e. support and
confidence can be applied to it. Other measures available for
evaluating the quality of a QAR are Lift, Leverage, Conviction,
Gain, Certainty-Factor etc. which are widely discussed in [4]
and [5]. If both the left and right side of a QAR has trivial
cedent, it is called single dimensional QAR else it is multi-
dimensional. An example of a multi-dimensional QAR is given
below:
Salary [40k · · · 50k] ∧ M arried : [Y es] ⇒ N umLoans : [2] (1)
In this QAR, Salary and NumLoans are Quantitative at-
tributes whereas Married is a nominal Categorical attribute
(with categories Yes & No). It is a positive QAR as the
consequent is positively correlated with the antecedent. Sim-
ilarly, negative rules represented as X ⇒ ¬Y may also be
discovered, that associate the presence of X to the absence of
Y in the rule. The antecedent X and consequent Y of a negative
QAR may consist of one or more attributes and accordingly
may be single or multi-dimensional. Importantly, for a QAR to
be negative either antecedent part or consequent part or both
of them have to be negated. Following are some examples of
negative QARs, with negation
1) within the antecedent :
X2 ∈ ¬[q1 , q2 ] ⇒ Y1 ∈ [r1 , r2 ] ∧ Y2 ∈ [s1 , s2 ] .
2) within the consequent :
X1 ∈ [p1 , p2 ] ∧ Y1 ∈ [r1 , r2 ] ⇒ X2 ∈ ¬[q1 , q2 ] ∧ Y2 ∈
[s1 , s2 ].
3) within both antecedent & consequent :
X1 ∈ ¬[p1 , p2 ] ∧ X2 ∈ [q1 , q2 ] ⇒ Y2 ∈ ¬[s1 , s2 ].
Here, X1 , X2 , Y1 and Y2 are quantitative attributes and
¬[Lb , Ub ] means those intervals other than [Lb , Ub ] where
Lb & Ub mean the lower and upper bound of an interval [6].
With these concepts to start with we may move on to
present the research trends in QARM in the next section.
III. QARM: T RENDS & T ECHNIQUES
Since inception of the problem, numerous contributions
are made using different approaches to mine QARs. Each
approach follows a trend and has several techniques within it.
Each such technique has its own pros and cons when applied
in different scenario. To have a quick glimpse of the trends in
QARM, we classify these techniques into certain categories
QARM Techniques
Partitioning Fuzzy Evolutionary
Clustering Statistical
Centroid Based Density Based Distribution Analysis
Mean Median Variance
Fig. 1. Classification of QARM techniques
based on the computational techniques (or approaches) they
adopted (shown in Fig:1). To have a better comprehension
of the same, we review the prominent techniques under each
category and discuss their merits and limitations.
A. Partitioning Approach
Srikant and Agrawal in their pioneering work [1] introduce
the partitioning approach to convert quantitative attributes into
boolean attributes by partitioning large range of quantitative
data into disjoint intervals and then map each (attribute,
interval) pair to a boolean attribute interpreting it as a market-
basket item. They also identify the min-support and min-
confidence problem lying within this approach. The min-
support problem says, if the count of intervals for a quantita-
tive attribute is high, the support for individual intervals may
be low and so a few QARs comprising this attribute may not
be detected for lacking minimum support. To overcome this
bottleneck, if interval-size is increased to reduce the number
of intervals the approach still suffers from information loss in
terms of confidence. This information loss multiplies with the
increase in interval size because some QARs comprising this
attribute may not be detected for lacking minimum confidence.
Moreover, the number of rules generated goes very large and
the rule-mining process becomes time consuming as well.
In [7] Chan and Au pointed out another weakness of the
partitioning approach that lies in the task of deciding appro-
priate thresholds for rule evaluation measures. If thresholds
are very large, a user may not discover some useful rules and
if thresholds are very small, the user may get confused by
many irrelevant rules. They suggested an objective interest-
ingness measure, called adjusted difference that requires no
user-supplied thresholds. Fukuda et al. [8] use computational
geometry that seem to enhance the partitioning approach.
They present optimized interval generation in linear time on
sorted data. However, while dealing large databases, sorting
of each numeric attribute is a costly affiar and occupy large
space in memory. Therefore, they propose the randomized
bucketing idea to discover optimized ranges for partitioning
quantitative attributes in huge databases. Commonly used
partitioning methods either follow equal-width or equal-depth
(also equal-frequency) intervals. Li et al. in [9] clarified that
the equal-width and equal-depth partitioning methods hardly
consider both value similarities and densities simultaneously.
Info-Theoretic
So they present an adaptive partitioning approach that merges
smaller intervals to form larger intervals, repeatedly. Their
unsupervised partitioning approach initially distributes quanti-
tative attribute value in a different interval and merge adjacent
similar intervals using a certain criterion considering both
Standard Deviation value similarities and densities of quantitative attributes.
Recently, Dancheng et al. [10] introduce a concept that
performs discretization using self-adaptive approach. This
approach generates better and reasonable partitions that gives
high confidence ARs thereby guaranteeing relatively high sup-
port. To find rules, this technique pre-computes the conditional
probability density curves of association between the quantita-
tive attributes. Next, it includes some wide ranges as partitions
that have values adjacent to the peak of the curve. Such
values help finding QARs having high confidence and wider
range helps finding QARs having higher support. Finally, these
partitions are used for apriori association rule mining. Though
self-adaptive based technique helps in discovering stronger
QARs thereby enhancing rule support & confidence, however
it is limited to reveal single numeral to nominal implications
only.
1) Discussion: The techniques using Partitioning approach
are prone to suffer from Support-Confidence conflict and many
127
rules problem because reasonable range or interval detection
is a challenge in partitioning. Majority of the research works
are inclined towards solving this issue. In addition, the use
of user-given thresholds as rule interestingness measure is
common throughout most of these techniques that ultimately
drives the overall quantity and quality of mined rules. QAR
mining using partitioning approach also takes higher execution
time and mostly yields single dimensional positive QARs.
B. Clustering Approach
Clustering is an effective alternative to find meaningful
quantitative regions for the discovery of association rules
in quantitative databases. An efficient hierarchical clustering
algorithm is proposed by Chien et al. in [11] relying upon
variation of density to generate intervals for mining QARs.
DRMiner [12] is a QARM technique that uses the notion of
density to handle quantitative attributes. It fairly finds positive
multi-dimensional association rules and because of the density
measure it can avoid trivial and redundant rules. DBSMiner
[13] aims to scale up well for high dimensional quantitative
association rule mining using the notion of density-connected.
The N -dimensional quantitative search space is divided into
multiple grids of rectangular units using equal-frequency par-
titioning of every attribute such that no such unit apparently
overlaps. In the grid, intersection of one interval from each
attribute is performed to form cells containing records. A cell
is considered dense if quantity of records in it exceeds a
user defined threshold. Finally, connected-high-density cells
are united to form clusters. Based on dense grid, Junrui et
al. [14] proposes another method MQAR (Mining Quantitative
Association Rule) that can solve the support-confidence con-
flict as well as can help to get rid of the noise and redundant
rules. MQAR uses a FP-tree [15] like DGFP-tree that helps
to mine association rules in high dimensional databases. The
DGFP-tree compress the database effectively and hence there
is no need of scanning the database many times. MQAR uses
a novel grid and density based clustering to cluster database
using dense subspaces in the tree. MQAR is scalable in dealing
with high dimensional databases. Miller and Yang [16] identify
the flaws of the equal depth partitioning method and present a
technique that suggests to discover clusters in the quantitative
attributes and use the resultant clusters as itemsets for finding
boolean association rules. A further extension of this idea can
be found in the work of Tong et al [17] where they improved
the partitioning method by taking into account the relations
among attributes all together. Initially, they form clusters using
quantitative attributes. Next, they map each cluster into the
domain of the quantitative attribute. Thus, these projections
return overlapped intervals which they consider reasonable
and assert to be a good resolution to the min-support and
min-confidence issues in partitioning approach.
1) Discussion: The techniques using Clustering approach
mostly concentrate on reasonable interval generation using the
concept of variation of density or dense regions. They also
try to reduce the support-confidence conflict and eliminate
useless, redundant rules. The simpler clustering techniques are
128
straightforward while the complex ones viz. [12], [13] and [14]
uses concepts like hyperplanes, dense-grids etc. Not all cluster-
ing techniques are fairly scalable for high dimensional cases
but most of them yield single as well as multi-dimensional
QARs. Use of min-sup, min-conf thresholds is common but
some techniques require the users to specify other thresholds.
The rules generated by the techniques from this approach are
however only positive.
C. Statistical Approach
Various statistical measures (such as mean, median, variance
etc.) are also applied in QARM. Aumann et al. [18] contribute
towards QARM research by providing a new statistical theory
for defining quantitative association rules. They considered
the distribution of the continuous data via standard statistical
measures. This technique yields positive multi-dimensional
quantitative association rules at the expense of larger database
scans and has a feature of generating meaningful sub-rules.
Kang et al. [19] propose another way of mining QAR using
statistical measures but with a thin influence of the parti-
tioning approach. They adopt a two step process. Firstly it
pre-processes all quantitative attributes to convert them into
binary attributes and next convert back the binary association
rules into QARs. The first step focuses on domain partition
of quantitative attributes by selecting the partitions whose
collective standard deviations is smaller. Once partitions are
ready, binary association rule (BAR) mining is used. Finally,
the post-processing step integrates the BARs to reconvert them
into corresponding QARs.
1) Discussion: Statistical approach uses various statistical
measures to analyze distributions or to determine reasonable
intervals for frequent itemset generation. The bipartition tech-
niques usually suffer from uneven distributions of values into
intervals resulting uninteresting QARs. Hence, measures like
standard deviation came into use. However, rules generated by
statistical techniques are positive and multi-dimensional but
rule-generation is costly due to greater number of database
scans.
D. Fuzzy Approach
Sometimes, detected intervals of attributes participating in
a QAR may not be precise or meaningful for analysts to
unleash non-trivial knowledge with ease. Instead of using
intervals, if linguistic terminologies could be used to represent
certain associations, frequent patterns etc. then knowledge
discovery could be more easier. Some applications may cosider
an AR interesting if only it discovers association amid some
useful concepts, such as regular customer, low salary and
new house [20]. Such concepts may be modelled using fuzzy
concept using fuzzy set theory. The rules having these terms
are called fuzzy association rules and the approach is con-
sidered as Fuzzy QARM approach. Zhang [20] formulates a
method to mine rules containing 1) crisp values, 2) intervals
and 3) fuzzy terms. It employed equal frequency partition
with fuzzy concept to handle quantitative and categorical at-
tributes. For discovering frequent item-sets it uses an extended
Apriori algorithm. Gyenesei [21] assigns each quantitative
attribute with several fuzzy sets (instead of sharp intervals)
that characterize the attribute. Fuzzy support, fuzzy confidence
and fuzzy correlation are used as interestingness measures.
Importantly, this method may suffer from anomalies if fuzzy
sets are not well chosen. In an another attempt [22] numerical
attributes are converted to fuzzy binary attributes and employs
efficient thread based mechanism for mining the quantitative
rules quickly. Recently, Zheng et al. [23] proposed a generic
Optimized Fuzzy Association Rule Mining (OFARM) method
which is easy to extend for continuous data. It optimizes the
partition points for fuzzy sets, where a multiple objective
function is used. A two-level iterative method is used to
generate association-rules. In addition to MinSup & MinConf,
this method uses one of the newer effective measures for
evaluation of association rules, called the Certainty Factor.
1) Discussion: In classical fuzzy techniques, linguitic ter-
minologies for defining partitions was the idea but the modern
ones, convert the quantitative data into fuzzy sets and partition
points are used to divide neighbouring fuzzy sets. One problem
with classical fuzzy QARM techniques is that they do not opti-
mize the selection of partition points and use Extended Apriori
which takes higher exec-time as dimensions increases. But,
the modern fuzzy techniques take care of it. The fuzzy QARs
using newer techniques are strong, positive and comprise at
most two dimensions within antecedents and one dimension
in the consequent. However, these techniques may even suffer
from the Support-Confidence conflict if the thresholds are not
wisely chosen.
E. Evolutionary Approach
The QAR mining problem is also treated with evolutionary
algorithmic (EA) approach by different researches in due
course. The most popular type of EA is the genetic algorithm
(GA) that has found utilization in QAR mining. Recent
research on QAR mining witnesses the use of multi-objective
evolutionary algorithms too. Alataş et al. [6] proposes a genetic
algorithmic strategy for both positive and negative QAR
mining. With the help of 1) adaptive mutation probability,
2) uniform operator and 3) an efficient fitness function; their
method is capable to mine QARs without taking any thresholds
and without data preparation. QuantMiner [24] is a GA based
approach that follows a set of rule templates while mining
rules. A template is nothing but a preset format of a QAR.
It may be selected by the user or may be system computed.
QuantMiner finds reasonable intervals in ARs dynamically, by
optimizing the support count and rule-confidence.
The QARM research also encompases multi-objective evo-
lutionary algorithm. The ARM process can be considered
as a multi-objective problem instead of a single objective
in which the rule evaluation measures may have different
objectives [4]. Kaya et al. [25] proposes two novel methods
to optimize QARs. They use three important criteria; support,
confidence and amplitude as thresholds. Recently, Martin et
al. [26] proposes a new multi-objective evolutionary approach
129
for mining a smaller set of +ve and -ve QARs with better
comprehensibility and lower cost of computation.
1) Discussion: Evolutionary algorithms often perform well
in finding approximate solutions to all types of problems
using mechanisms inspired by biological evolution. The GA
approach has the specialty to mine both positive and negative
QAR without discretizing attributes at prior. Hence, it takes
lesser database scans and also yields rules with optimized sup-
port and confidence. Multi-objective evolutionary techniques
are result of recent research that try to reduce the cost of
mining and optimize the number of positive and negative
QARs generated without compromising rule interestingness.
F. Other Approaches
There are several approaches (other than those which are
classified above) that try to solve quantitative association rule
mining in their own ways. Cheng et al. in [27] highlight that
another combinatorial explosion problem may get triggered
by the task of combining the adjacent intervals of a quan-
titative attribute to increase support and detect meaningful
intervals. To address this combinatorial explosion problem
using information-theoretic approach, they introduce the MIC
(Mutual Information and Clique) framework to inspect the
mutual information (MI) between every attribute pairs and
establish a MI Graph representing attributes having strong
informative relationship w.r.t. a pre-defined threshold. Thus,
each frequent item-set is represented by a Clique present in
the MI Graph. In this method, the attribute sets and their
corresponding intervals to be combined (or joined) can be
reduced effectively. Li et al. [28] extends a grid-based QAR
mining method using meta-rules that store data tuples in linked
lists where QAR mining is executed. In meta-rule guided
association rule mining, some syntactic or semantic constraints
are specified in the form of rules.
Nemmiche and Guillaume [29] introduce another different
method for mining optimal positive and negative QARs. They
state that irrespective of the fact whether an AR is +ve or -ve;
the use of support and confidence as rule interestingness mea-
sures is not sufficient for optimal QAR generation. Therefore,
in their method they used tables to summarize the trend of
variable interactions, thereby highlighting the zones that are
interesting. Moreover, the method also introduces a new rule
semantic of the form influential(s) → Influenceable(s) and an
impact measure Influence that analyses variable behavior and
guarantees that rules of higher potential will be discovered
discarding the irrelevant ones.
1) Discussion: The above techniques are applied on QAR
mining without having much influence from the general ap-
proaches. They have their own unique way of dealing with
QAR mining problem. Most of these techniques strive to mini-
mize the many-rules generation and irrelevant-rules generation
problem. The metarule guided technique tries to find multi-
dimensional rules and is linearly scalable to database size
and dimensions. The next technique deploying impact measure
usage has capability to mine both positive and negative QAR
 TABLE I
S UMMARY OF DIFFERENT QAR M INING A PPROACHES

Rule Use Other

Approach Advantages Disadvantages Discret- No. of (-)ve
Dimen- Sup. & Thresh-
ization Scans Rules
sion Conf. olds
Information Loss,
Partitioning Easier to understand many rules, redundant Single 3 3 3 Multiple 7
[1], [7]–[10] and implement rules, Sup-Conf
Conflict

Reasonable Interval Often lacks

Clustering Generation (strive to High Dimensional Multiple 3 3 3 Multiple 7
[12]–[14] get best clusters as Scalability, Require
intervals) Many Thresholds

Statistical Larger Database Scans,

No Misleading Rules, Uneven Distributions Multiple 3 7 3 Multiple 7
[18], [19] Generates Sub Rules appear in Partitions

Interprete intervals as Require fuzzy thresholds,

Fuzzy [20], fuzzy terms, Discover Execution time increases Multiple 3 3 3 Multiple 7
[21], [23] rules having crisp in case of higher
values also dimensions

Mine +ve & -ve rules

without discretization, Comparatively difficult
Evolutionary Multiple 7 3 7 Multiple 3
Optimize Support and to implement, higher
[6], [25], [26]
Confidence, Maximise computational cost
rule comprehensibility

Reduces combinatorial
Information- explosion of intervals Not much effective Multiple 3 7 3 Multiple 7
Theoretic [27] that appear in most in smaller databases
partitioning techniques

which are potentially pertinent. However, most of these tech-

niques needs min-support and min-confidence thresholds to
find relevant rules and hence are prone to Support-Confidence
conflict. 18%
15%

9% 26%
IV. S UMMARY

11%
Different QAR mining approaches discussed above is sum-
marized in Table I and the proportion of contributions w.r.t 21%
the approaches is shown in Fig 2. We can observe from
Table I that every QAR mining technique has its pros and
cons. Despite several differences in the context of dealing
quantitative data, the use of support and confidence as rule-
interestingness measures is common throughout most of the
approaches. The use of newer rule evaluation measures (as Partitioning 26% Clustering 21%
stated in [4] and [5]) are also found in several modern QARM Fuzzy 11% Statistical 9%
techniques. Evolutionary 15% Others 18%
Table I also highlights that there are a few approaches Fig. 2. Proportion of contributions in various QARM approaches.
dealing with negative association rules and no technique is
capable of mining QAR in single database scan. However,
techniques from all approaches other than those from partition- V. C ONCLUSION
ing are capable of mining rules of more than one dimension. In
addition, discretization or data preparation is another common QARM techniques are essential for discovering knowledge
step for all techniques except the few using EA. Information from the real-world databases that contain high volume of
loss due to discretization is prominent using partitioning. quantitative and categorical data. In recent decades, different

130
QARM techniques found applications in various domains [30].
Therefore, a large number of research works are contributed
towards efficiently solving the problem of QAR mining. In
this work, we highlight various trends in QARM research and
present a comprehensive study on various approaches with
their relative merits and limitations. To conclude it can be
stated that from the broad variety of techniques in existence
no particular technique seems to be suitable for application
in all domains because the appearance, size and nature of
data belonging to different domains vary. Moreover, current
solutions may be considered inadequate because there are
several issues pertaining to the available QARM techniques
which we identify and enlist below:
1) Inability to mine both Positive and Negative QARs.
2) Failure to generate efficient multi-dimensional QARs.
3) Dependence on proper selection of thresholds for gen-
erating rules.
4) Redundant, uninteresting and misleading rules genera-
tion.
5) Poor scalability of the mining technique w.r.t database
dimensions and volume.
6) Large database scans to generate frequent itemsets and
mine rules.
7) High computational cost or execution time.
Further works are required to address these issues and thus
bring in novel scopes for future researches in the QARM
scenario.
R EFERENCES
[1] R. Srikant and R. Agrawal, “Mining quantitative association rules in
large relational tables,” in ACM SIGMOD Record, vol. 25, no. 2. ACM,
1996, pp. 1–12.
[2] R. Agrawal, T. Imieliński, and A. Swami, “Mining association rules
between sets of items in large databases,” in ACM SIGMOD Record,
vol. 22, no. 2. ACM, 1993, pp. 207–216.
[3] J. Han, M. Kamber, and J. Pei, Data mining, southeast asia edition:
Concepts and techniques. Morgan kaufmann, 2006.
[4] M. Martı́nez-Ballesteros and J. Riquelme, “Analysis of measures of
quantitative association rules,” in Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems.
Springer, 2011, pp. 319–326.
[5] M. Martı́nez-Ballesteros, F. Martı́nez-Álvarez, A. Troncoso, and J. C.
Riquelme, “Selecting the best measures to discover quantitative associ-
ation rules,” Neurocomputing, vol. 126, pp. 3–14, 2014.
[6] B. Alataş and E. Akin, “An efficient genetic algorithm for automated
mining of both positive and negative quantitative association rules,” Soft
Computing, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 230–237, 2006.
[7] K. C. Chan and W.-H. Au, “An effective algorithm for mining inter-
esting quantitative association rules,” in Proceedings of the 1997 ACM
symposium on Applied computing. ACM, 1997, pp. 88–90.
[8] T. Fukuda, Y. Morimoto, S. Morishita, and T. Tokuyama, “Mining
optimized association rules for numeric attributes,” in Proceedings of
the fifteenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles
of database systems. ACM, 1996, pp. 182–191.
[9] J. Li, H. Shen, and R. Topor, “An adaptive method of numerical
attribute merging for quantitative association rule mining,” in Internet
Applications. Springer, 1999, pp. 41–50.
[10] L. Dancheng, Z. Ming, Z. Shuangshuang, and Z. Chen, “A new ap-
proach of self-adaptive discretization to enhance the apriori quantitative
association rule mining,” in Intelligent System Design and Engineering
131
View publication stats
Application (ISDEA), 2012 Second International Conference on. IEEE,
2012, pp. 44–47.
[11] B.-C. Chien, Z.-L. Lin, and T.-P. Hong, “An efficient clustering algorithm
for mining fuzzy quantitative association rules,” in IFSA World Congress
and 20th NAFIPS International Conference, 2001. Joint 9th, vol. 3.
IEEE, 2001, pp. 1306–1311.
[12] W. Lian, D. W. Cheung, and S. Yiu, “An efficient algorithm for finding
dense regions for mining quantitative association rules,” Computers &
Mathematics with Applications, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 471–490, 2005.
[13] Y. Guo, J. Yang, and Y. Huang, “An effective algorithm for mining
quantitative association rules based on high dimension cluster,” in
Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing, 2008.
WiCOM’08. 4th International Conference on. IEEE, 2008, pp. 1–4.
[14] Y. Junrui and Z. Feng, “An effective algorithm for mining quantitative
associations based on subspace clustering,” in Networking and Digital
Society (ICNDS), 2010 2nd International Conference on, vol. 1. IEEE,
2010, pp. 175–178.
[15] J. Han, J. Pei, and Y. Yin, “Mining frequent patterns without candidate
generation,” in ACM SIGMOD Record, vol. 29, no. 2. ACM, 2000, pp.
1–12.
[16] R. J. Miller and Y. Yang, “Association rules over interval data,” in ACM
SIGMOD Record, vol. 26, no. 2. ACM, 1997, pp. 452–461.
[17] Q. Tong, B. Yan, and Y. Zhou, “Mining quantitative association rules
on overlapped intervals,” in Advanced Data Mining and Applications.
Springer, 2005, pp. 43–50.
[18] Y. Aumann and Y. Lindell, “A statistical theory for quantitative associ-
ation rules,” Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 20, no. 3,
pp. 255–283, 2003.
[19] G.-M. Kang, Y.-S. Moon, H.-Y. Choi, and J. Kim, “Bipartition tech-
niques for quantitative attributes in association rule mining,” in TENCON
2009-2009 IEEE Region 10 Conference. IEEE, 2009, pp. 1–6.
[20] W. Zhang, “Mining fuzzy quantitative association rules,” in 2012 IEEE
24th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence.
IEEE Computer Society, 1999, pp. 99–99.
[21] A. Gyenesei, “A fuzzy approach for mining quantitative association
rules.” Acta Cybern., vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 305–320, 2001.
[22] S. Prakash and R. Parvathi, “Qualitative approach for quantitative
association rule mining using fuzzy rule set,” Journal of Computational
Information Systems, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 1879–1885, 2011.
[23] H. Zheng, J. He, G. Huang, and Y. Zhang, “Optimized fuzzy association
rule mining for quantitative data,” in Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE), 2014
IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2014, pp. 396–403.
[24] A. Salleb-Aouissi, C. Vrain, and C. Nortet, “Quantminer: A genetic
algorithm for mining quantitative association rules.” in IJCAI, vol. 7,
2007.
[25] M. Kaya and R. Alhajj, “Novel approach to optimize quantitative
association rules by employing multi-objective genetic algorithm,” in
Innovations in Applied Artificial Intelligence. Springer, 2005, pp. 560–
562.
[26] D. Martin, A. Rosete, J. Alcalá-Fdez, and F. Herrera, “A new multiob-
jective evolutionary algorithm for mining a reduced set of interesting
positive and negative quantitative association rules,” Evolutionary Com-
putation, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 54–69, 2014.
[27] Y. Ke, J. Cheng, and W. Ng, “Mic framework: an information-theoretic
approach to quantitative association rule mining,” in Data Engineering,
2006. ICDE’06. Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on.
IEEE, 2006, pp. 112–112.
[28] J. Li and X. Ye, “Study on linked list-based algorithm for metarule-
guided mining of multidimensional quantitative association rules,” in
Natural Computation, 2007. ICNC 2007. Third International Conference
on, vol. 1. IEEE, 2007, pp. 300–304.
[29] L. N. Alachaher and S. Guillaume, “Variables interaction for mining
negative and positive quantitative association rules.” in ICTAI, 2006, pp.
82–85.
[30] D. Adhikary and S. Roy, “Mining quantitative association rules in real-
world databases: A review,” in Computing and Communication Systems
(I3CS), 2015 1st International Conference on, vol. 1. IGI Global, 2015,
pp. 87–92.