Journal of King Saud University Computer and Information Sciences (2011) 23, 16

King Saud University

Journal of King Saud University

Computer and Information Sciences
www.ksu.edu.sa
www.sciencedirect.com

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A Quantum Swarm Evolutionary Algorithm

for mining association rules in large databases
Mourad Ykhlef
King Saud University, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Saudi Arabia
Received 4 April 2009; accepted 22 March 2010
Available online 8 December 2010

KEYWORDS
Quantum Evolutionary
Algorithm;
Swarm intelligence;
Association rule mining;
Fitness

Abstract Association rule mining aims to extract the correlation or causal structure existing
between a set of frequent items or attributes in a database. These associations are represented by
mean of rules. Association rule mining methods provide a robust but non-linear approach to nd
associations. The search for association rules is an NP-complete problem. The complexities mainly
arise in exploiting huge number of database transactions and items. In this article we propose a new
algorithm to extract the best rules in a reasonable time of execution but without assuring always the
optimal solutions. The new derived algorithm is based on Quantum Swarm Evolutionary approach;
it gives better results compared to genetic algorithms.
2010 King Saud University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Data mining methods such as association rule mining (Agrawal et al., 1993a,b) are gaining popularity for their power
and ease of use. Association rule learning methods provide a
robust and non-linear approach to nd associations (correlations) and causal structures among sets of frequent items or
attributes in a database. Association rule algorithms, such as
Apriori (Agrawal et al., 1993a,b), examine a long list of transE-mail address: [email protected]
1319-1578 2010 King Saud University. Production and hosting by
Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Peer review under responsibility of King Saud University.
doi:10.1016/j.jksuci.2010.03.001

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actions in order to determine which items are most frequently

purchased together. The challenge of extracting association
patterns from data draws upon research in databases, machine
learning and optimization to deliver advanced intelligent solutions. The algorithms for performing association rule mining
are NP-complete as they were proved in Angiulli et al.
(2001), the authors of Angiulli et al. (2001) have shown that
association rule mining can be reduced to nding a CLIQUE
in a graph which is NP-complete. The complexities mainly
arise in exploiting huge number of items and database
transactions.
Many algorithms have been proposed for mining association rules; we can categorize these algorithms into two
branches: (1) Exact algorithms such as Apriori (Agrawal
et al., 1993a,b) and FP-Growth (Pei et al., 2000). These algorithms guaranty the optimal solution despite the time required
to obtain that solution. (2) Evolutionary algorithms (Lopes
et al., 1999; Melab and El-Ghazali, 2000), which give good
solution and may be non-optimal ones but in a reasonable time
(polynomial) of execution.

M. Ykhlef

Association rule mining in large databases is a very complex process and exact algorithms are very expensive to use.
We think that evolutionary computing provides much help
in this arena. In this article, we address the issue of using a
Quantum Swarm Evolutionary Algorithm (QSE) (Wang
et al., 2006) for mining association rules. QSE is a hybridization of Quantum Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA) (Han and
Kim, 2002) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) (Kennedy
and Eberhart, 1995).
QEA approach is better than classical evolutionary algorithms like genetic algorithm, instead of using binary, numeric
or symbolic representation; QEA uses a Q-bit as a probabilistic
representation, dened as the smallest unit of information. A
Q-bit individual is dened by a string of Q-bits called multiple
Q-bits. The Q-bit individual has the advantage that it can
represent a linear superposition of states (binary solutions) in
search space probabilistically. Thus, the Q-bit representation
has a better characteristic of population diversity than chromosome representation used in genetic algorithm. A Q-gate
is also dened as a variation operator of QEA to drive the individuals toward better solutions and eventually toward a single
state.
QSE (Wang et al., 2006) employs a novel quantum bit
expression mechanism called quantum angle and adopted
the improved PSO to update Q-bit of QEA automatically.
The authors of Wang et al. (2006) prove that QSE is better
than QEA.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows:
Section 2 presents basics of association rule mining. In Section
3, we give a general description of quantum computing and
particle swarm optimization. In Section 4, we present a new
approach to mine association rules. Section 5 illustrates our
experimental results.
2. Association rule mining
2.1. Problem denition
Association rule mining is formally dened as follows. Let
I fi1 ; i2 ; . . . ; im g be a set of Boolean attributes called items
and S fs1 ; s2 ; . . . ; sn g be a multi-set of records representing
data instances or transactions, where each record or data instance si 2 S is constituted from the non-repeatable attributes
from I. The presence of a Boolean attribute in a data instance
si means that its value is 1, if it is absent, its value is set to 0.
For example, let I fA; B; Cg be a set of Boolean attributes
and let S fhA; Bi; hCi; hCig be a multi-set of data instances,
the multi-set S can be rewritten as follows:
S fhA 1; B 1; C 0i; hA 0; B 0; C 1i;
hA 0; B 0; C 1ig
For categorical attribute, instead of having one attribute in I,
we have as many attributes as the number of attribute values.
For example, the more general multi-set of data instances S given by:

height-166 = 0, height-170 = 0, height-174 = 1, gendermale = 0, gender-female = 1}

is intended to abstract a multi-set of three data instances having two categorical attributes: height and gender. The values of
(height, gender) are {(166, female), (170, male), (174, female)},
respectively.
An association rule is denoted by IF C THEN P when C
states for Condition(s) and P for Prediction(s) where C,
P  I and C \ P= B.
In this article we are particularly interested by the conjunctive association rules where C is a conjunction of one or more
condition(s) and P is also a conjunction of one or more prediction(s). The following notations are used in the remainder of the
article:
 C: The number of data instances which are covered by
(i.e. satisfying) the C part of the rule.
 P: The number of data instances which are covered by the
P part of the rule.
 C&P: The number of data instances which are covered by
both the C part and the P part of the rule.
 N: The total number of data instances being mined.
The condence b of a rule is the probability of the occurrence of P knowing that C is observed; b is equal to

jC&Pj
.
jCj

The prediction frequency a is equal to jPj

. Note that the support
N
is equal to the fraction jC&Pj
.
jNj
2.2. Fitness function
The quality of a candidate rule is evaluated by means of a tness function. Several tness functions have been dened in the
literature (Agrawal et al., 1993a,b; Lopes et al., 1999). They
can be basic or complex. An example of a basic function is
the support of a rule (the percentage of data instances satisfying the C part of the rule) and the condence factor (the
percentage of data instances satisfying the implication IF C
THEN P). It is claimed that such basic tness function is
not sufcient. In this article we adopt the complex tness
function of Lopes et al. (1999). This function is derived from
information theory and it is based on J-measure Jm given by:

 
jCj
b
 b  log
Jm
N
a
The tness function F is the following:
 
n
w1  Jm w2  npuT
F
w1 w2
where npu is the number of potentially useful attributes. A given attribute A is said to be potentially useful if there is at least
one data instance having both the As value specied in the
part C and the prediction attribute(s). The term nT is the total
number of attributes in the part C of the rule; w1, w2 are user
dened weights set to 0.6 and 0.4, respectively.
3. Quantum computing and particle swarm optimization

{height-166 = 1, height-170 = 0, height-174 = 0, gendermale = 0, gender-female = 1,

height-166 = 0, height-170 = 1, height-174 = 0, gendermale = 1, gender-female = 0,

Quantum computing (QC) is an emergent eld calling upon several specialties: physics, engineering, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. QC uses the specicities of quantum

A Quantum Swarm Evolutionary Algorithm for mining association rules in large databases
mechanics for processing and transformation of data stored in
two-state quantum bits or Q-bit(s) for short. A Q-bit can take
state value 0, 1 or a superposition of the two states at the same
time. The state of a Q-bit can be represented as w = a0 +
b1 where a and b are the amplitudes of 0 and 1, respectively, in this state. When we measure this Q-bit, we see 0 with
probability a2, and 1 with probability b2 such that
a2 + b2 = 1.
The idea of superposition makes it possible to represent an
exponential whole of states with a small number of Q-bits.
According to the quantum laws like interference, the linearity
of quantum operations makes the quantum computing more
powerful than the classical machines.
In order to exploit effectively the power of quantum computing, it is necessary to create efcient quantum algorithms.
A quantum algorithm consists in applying a succession of
quantum operations on quantum systems. Shor (1994) demonstrated that QC could solve efciently NP-complete problems
by describing a polynomial time quantum algorithm for factoring numbers.
One of the most known algorithms is Quantum-inspired
Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA) (Han and Kim, 2002), which
is inspired by the concept of quantum computing. This
algorithm has been rst used to solve knapsack problem (Han
and Kim, 2002) and then it has rst used to solve different
NP-complete problems like Traveling Salesman Problem (Talbi
et al., 2004) and Multiple Sequence Alignment (Layeb et al.,
2006, 2008).
Meanwhile, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has demonstrated a good performance in many functions and parameter
optimization problems. PSO is a population-based optimization strategy. It is initialized with a group of random particles
and then updates their velocities and positions with the following formula:
vt 1 vt c1  rand  pbestt  presentt
c2  rand  gbestt  presentt
presentt 1 presentt vt 1
where vt is the particle velocity, presentt is the current particle. pbestt and gbestt are dened as individual best and
global best. rand is a random number between [0, 1]. c1, c2
are learning factors; usually c1 = c2 = 2 (Wang et al., 2006).
In the next section we will tailor the hybrid Quantum
Swarm Evolutionary Algorithm (QSE) (Wang et al., 2006) to
the problem of mining association rules.
4. The QSE-RM approach
In this section we rst present QEA-RM for association rule
mining and then we give a PSO version of QEA-RM named
QSE-RM.
In order to show how QEA concepts have been tailored to
the problem of association rule mining, a formulation of the
problem in terms of quantum representation is presented and
a Quantum Swarm Evolutionary Algorithm for association
rules mining QSE-RM is derived.
4.1. Quantum representation
QEA-RM uses the novel representation based on the concept
of string of Q-bits called multiple Q-bit dened as below:


Q


a1 
b1 


a2 
...
b2 


am 
bm 

where at2 + bt2 = 1, t 1; . . . ; m, m is the number of Qbits. Quantum Evolutionary Algorithm with the multiple Qbit representation has a better diversity than classical genetic
algorithm since it can represent superposition of states. Only
one multiple Q-bit with three Q-bits such as:
" 1  1  1 #


p 
p
 2p 
2
2



p1 
 p12  23 
2
is enough to represent the following system with eight states:
p
p
p
3
3
3
1
1
1
j001i  j010i 
j011i j100i
j101i
j000i
4
4
4
4
4
4
p
1
3
j111i
 j110i 
4
4
This means that the probabilities to represent the states 0 0 0,
0 0 1, 0 1 0, 0 1 1, 1 0 0, 1 0 1, 1 1 0, 1 1 1 are 1/16, 3/16,
1/16, 3/16, 1/16, 3/16, 1/16, 1/16 respectively. However in
genetic algorithm one needs eight chromosomes for encoding.
For the data instances S of Section 2.1 given by
S fhA 1; B 1; C 0i; hA 0; B 0; C 1i; hA 0; B 0;
C 1ig one would have a multiple Q-bits representation constituted from 3 Q-bits.
4.2. Measurement
The measurement of single Q-bit projects the quantum state
onto one of the basis states associated with the measuring device. The process of measurement changes the state to that
measured. The multiple Q-bit measurement can be treated as
a series of single Q-bit measurements to yield a binary solution
P. In association rules, the occurrence of 1 in P means that the
corresponding item or the attribute value is present in P however 0 means that the corresponding item or attribute value is
absent from P.
4.3. Structure of QEA-RM
The Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm for association rules mining (QEA-RM) is described as follows:
Procedure QEA-RM
begin
t0
initialize population of Q-bit individuals Qt
project Qt into binary solutions P t
compute tness of P t
generate association rule from each P t if there is any
store the best solutions among P t
while (not end-condition) do
tt+1
project Q(t  1) into binary solutions P t
compute tness from P t
generate association rule from each P t if there is any
update Qt using Q-gate
store the best solutions among P t
end
end

M. Ykhlef
Table 1
xi

0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1

Lookup table.
fx P fb

bi

0
0
1
1
0
0
1
1

False
True
False
True
False
True
False
True

Dhi
0
0
0
Delta
Delta
Delta
Delta
Delta

In the step initialize population of Q-bitpindividuals

Qt

the values of ai and bi are initialized with 1= 2. The step project Qt into binary solutions Pt generates binary solutions
by observing the states of population Qt; for each bit in multiple Q-bit we generate a random variable between 0 and 1; if
random(0, 1) < bi2 then we generate 1 else 0 is generated. In
the step compute tness of Pt, each binary solution Pt is
evaluated for the tness value computed by the formula F of
Section 2.2. The step update Qt using Q-gate is introduced
as follows (Han and Kim, 2002):
Procedure update Qt
begin
i0
while (i < m) do
ii+1
determine Dhi with the lookup table
a0i b0i T U Dhi ai bi T
end
end
Quantum gate UDh1pti is a variable operator, it can be
chosen according to the problem. We use the quantum gate dened in Han and Kim (2002) as follows:


 cosnDhi  sinnDhi 

UDhi 
sinnDhi cosnDhi 
where nDhi sai ; bi  Dhi ; s(ai, bi) and Dhi represents the
rotation direction and angle, respectively. The lookup table is
presented in Table 1, Delta is the step size and should be
designed in compliance with the application problem. However, it has not had the theoretical basis till now, even though
it usually is set as small value. Many applications set
Delta = 0.01p. The function f(x) (resp. f(b)) is the prot of
the binary solution x (resp. best solution b). For example, if
the condition f(x) P f(b) is satised and xi, bi are 1 and 0,
respectively, we can set the value of Dhi as 0.01p and sai ; bi
as +1, 1, or 0 according to the condition of ai, bi; so as to
increase the probability of the state 1.
4.4. Structure of QSE-RM
In order to introduce QSE-RM we present quantum angle. A
quantum angle (Wang et al., 2006) is dened as an arbitrary
angle h and a Q-bit is presented
h
i as [h]. Then [h] is equivalent

to the original Q-bit as

sinh
cosh

. It satises the condition:

s(ai, bi)
aibi > 0

ai bi < 0

ai = 0

bi = 0

0
0
0
1
1
+1
+1
+1

0
0
0
+1
+1
1
1
1

0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0

0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1

j sinhj2 j coshj2 1:

a1 
b1 
placed by: [h1 h2 . . . hm].
The common rotation gate


Then a multiple Q-bit


a2 
...
b2 


am 
could be rebm 

a0i b0i T UDhi ai bi T



 cosnDhi  sinnDhi 
, is replaced by
where UDhi 
sinnDhi cosnDhi 
h0i  hi nDhi .
QSE-RM uses the concept of swarm intelligence of the PSO
and regards all multiple Q-bit in the population as an intelligent group, which is named quantum swarm. First QSE-RM
nds the local best quantum angle and the global best value
from the local ones. Then according to these values, quantum
angles are updated by quantum gate. The QSE-RM based on
QEA-RM is given as follows:
1. Use quantum angle to encode Q-bit Qt using Qt
fqt1 ; qt2 ; . . . ; qtm g and qti htj1 jhtj2 j . . . jhtjm 
2. Project Qt into binary solutions P t by observing the
state of Qt through j coshj2 as follows: for quantum
angle, we generate a random variable between 0 and 1; if
random0; 1 > j coshj2 then we generate 1 else 0 is
generated.
3. The update Qt using Q-gate is modied with the following PSO formula (Wang et al., 2006):
vt1
v  x  vtji c1  rand  htji pbest  htji
ji
c2  rand  hti gbest  htji
ht1
htji vjit1
ji
where vtji , htji , htji pbest and hti gbest are the velocity, current
position, individual best and global best of the ith Q-bit of
the jth multiple Q-bit. The parameters v, x, c1, c2 are, respectively, set to 0.99, 0.7298, 1.42, 1.57.

5. Test and evaluation

In this section we compare Quantum Swarm Evolutionary
Algorithm (QSE-RM) to the non-parallel version of Genetic
Algorithm (GA-PVMINER) (Lopes et al., 1999). Since the
parameters of QSE-RM are different from the parameters
of GA-PVMINER, the comparison between QSE-RM and
GA-PVMINER is done by xing a threshold of time

A Quantum Swarm Evolutionary Algorithm for mining association rules in large databases
Table 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

Structure of the Nursery School database.

Attribute name

Attribute values

Parents
Has_nurs
Form
Children
Housing
Finance
Social
Health
Recommendation

Usual, pretentious, great_pret

Proper, less_proper, improper, critical, very_crit
Complete, completed,incomplete, foster
1, 2, 3, more
Convenient, less_conv, critical
Convenient, inconv
Non-prob, slightly_prob, problematic
Recommended, priority, not_recom
Not_recom, recommend, very_recom, priority, spec_prior

and available from UCI repository (http://www.archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/) of machine learning. Nursery database was derived
from a hierarchical decision model originally developed to
rank applications for nursery schools (Bohanec and Rajkovic,
1990).
The Nursery database contains 12,960 instances and 9 attributes, all of them categorical. The structure of Nursery database is given in Table 2.
As it is done in Lopes et al. (1999) we have specied three
goal attributes, namely Recommendation, Social and Finance.
A threshold of execution time is xed. In all cases, our results
are better than those found by GA-PVMINER.

execution. In the remainder of this section, we will see that for

the same goal and for the same time of execution, QSE-RM
has generated rules with tness better than the tness of rules
given by GA-PVMINER. Recall that QSE-RM and GAPVMINER algorithms belong to the class of evolutionary
algorithms. Evolutionary algorithms give good solution and
may be non-optimal ones but in a reasonable time (polynomial) of execution. All the tests were performed on 1.86 GHz
Intel Centrino PC machine with 1.00 GB RAM, running
on Windows XP platform. QSE-RM algorithm is written with
MATLAB programming language. The dataset used for testing, namely the nursery school dataset, is a public domain

Table 3

Results for goal Recommendation = not_recom.

Rule

Table 4
1

C&P

Fitness

J-measure

0.33

0.40003

0.00005144

0.40036

0.00059339

1440

0.40010

0.00016954

4320

0.40005

0.00008476

Rule

C&P

Fitness

J-measure

IF Has_nurs = very_crit AND

Health = priority THEN
Recommendation = spec_prior
IF Parents = pretentious AND
Has_nurs = very_crit AND
Children = 1 AND
Housing = critical AND
Finance = convenient AND
Social = slightly_prob AND
Health = priority THEN
Recommendation = spec_prior

855

0.98

0.40011

0.00017626

0.40038

0.00062905

IF Housing = convenient AND

Finance = inconv THEN
Recommendation = not_recom
IF Parents = great_pret AND
Has_nurs = proper AND
Children = 2 AND
Housing = less_conv AND
Finance = inconv AND
Social = nonprob AND
Health = not_recom THEN
Recommendation = not_recom
IF Parents = great_pret AND
Health = not_recom THEN
Recommendation = not_recom
IF Health = not_recom THEN
Recommendation = not_recom

720

Results for goal Recommendation = spec_prior.

M. Ykhlef

For the goal Recommendation = not_recom, the best rule

found by GA-PVMINER is given in the rst row of Table 3.
In addition to this rule, our algorithm QSE-RM has discovered other more interesting rules, which are given in rows 2,
3 and 4 of Table 3. For example, the following rule is very
important than the best rule given by GA-PVMINER:
\IF Health not recom THEN Recommendation
not recom"
with support C&P = 4320, condence b = 1 and tness =
0.40005.
For the goal Recommendation = spec_prior, the best rule
found by GA-PVMINER is given in the rst row of Table 4.
In addition to this rule, our algorithm QSE-RM has discovered other more interesting rule with tness = 0.40038 (see
row 2 of Table 4).
The authors of Lopes et al. (1999) stated that the best rule
found by their GA-PVMINER algorithm is:
\IF Has nurs very crit AND Health
priority THEN Recommendation
spec prior"
with condence b = 0.9 and tness = 0.4. The following rule
is more important than the previous rule for the support
reason:
\IF Finance inconv AND Health
not recom THEN Recommendation
not recom"
with support C&P = 2160, condence b = 1 and tness =
0.400.
Concerning the goals Social and Finance our results are
also better than those found by GA-PVMINER.
6. Conclusion
In this article, we discussed the use of Quantum Swarm Evolutionary approach (Wang et al., 2006) to improve the process
of mining association rules. A derived algorithm QSE-RM is
proposed. The experimental studies prove the effectiveness
QSE-RM algorithm comparing with PVMINER (Lopes et al.,
1999). As ongoing work we study the effect of parallelization
of QSE-RM in the same spirit of PGA-RM (Melab and
El-Ghazali, 2000) and we plan to add more hybridization to
QSE-RM.

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