Association Rule Mining Using Genetic Algorithm:

The Role of Estimation Parameters

K. Indira1 and S. Kanmani2

1
Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science,
Pondicherry Engineering College, Puducherry, India
[email protected]
2
Professor, Department of Information Technology,
Pondicherry Engineering College, Puducherry, India
[email protected]

Abstract. Genetic Algorithms (GA) have emerged as practical, robust optimi-

zation and search methods to generate accurate and reliable Association Rules.
The performance of GA for mining association rules greatly depends on the GA
parameters namely population size, crossover rate, mutation rate, fitness func-
tion adopted and selection method. The objective of this paper is to compare the
performance of the Genetic algorithm for association rule mining by varying
these parameters. The algorithm when tested on three datasets namely Lenses,
Iris and Haberman indicates that the accuracy depends mainly on the fitness
function which is the key parameter of GA. The population size is affected by
the size of the dataset under study. The crossover probability brings changes in
convergence rate with minimal changes in accuracy. The size of the dataset and
relationship between its attributes also plays a role in achieving the optimum
accuracy.

Keywords: Association rules, Genetic Algorithm, Population size, Crossover

rate, Fitness function.

1 Introduction
Data mining, also referred as knowledge discovery in database, means a process of
nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful informa-
tion (such as knowledge rules, constraints, regularities) from data in database. Data
mining combines theory and technology of several domains which include artificial
intelligence, machine learning, statistics, neural network and so on. Association rule
mining is a major area in data mining that discovers the relations between different
attributes by analyzing and disposing data in the database.
Many algorithms for generating association rules were developed over time. Some
of the well known algorithms are Apriori, Eclat and FP-Growth tree. Many existing
algorithms traverse the database many times so the I/O overhead and computational
complexity becomes very high and cannot meet the requirements of large-scale data-
base mining. Genetic algorithm is an algorithm which based on the biological theory
of evolution and molecular genetics of the global random search, the algorithm has a

A. Abraham et al. (Eds.): ACC 2011, Part I, CCIS 190, pp. 639–648, 2011.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
640 K. Indira and S. Kanmani

strong randomness, robust and implicit parallelism and can quickly and effectively
search for global optimization, in an effective way to deal with large-scale data sets.
At present, genetic algorithm-based data mining methods have yielded some progress,
and based on genetic algorithms classification system has also yielded some results.
This paper analyses the mining of Association Rules by applying Genetic Algo-
rithms. There have been several attempts for mining association rules using Genetic
Algorithm. Robert Cattral et al. [1] describe the evolution of hierarchy of rule using
genetic algorithm with chromosomes of varying length and macro mutations. The
initial population is seeded rather than random selection. Manish Saggar et al. [2]
proposes an algorithm with binary encoding and the fitness function was generated
based on confusion matrix. The individuals are represented using the Michigan’s Ap-
proach. Roulette Wheel selection is done by first normalizing the values of all candi-
dates.
Genetic algorithm based on the concept of strength of implication of rules was pre-
sented by Zhou et al. [3]. The properties of independence and correlation of descrip-
tions in rules are taken up for fitness calculation. Genxiang et al. [4] introduced
dynamic immune evolution, and biometric mechanism in Engineering immune com-
puting namely immune recognition, immune memory and immune regulation to GA
for mining association rules.
Gonzales. E et al. [5] introduced the Genetic Relation Algorithm (GRA) based on
evaluating the distances between rules. The distance is calculated using both matching
criteria namely complete match and partial match. Genetic algorithm easily leads to
premature convergence or takes too much time to converge during evolution process.
Hong Lei et al. [6] propose GA where the fitness function is based on predictive ac-
curacy, comprehensibility and interestingness factor. The selection method is based
on elitist recombination.
In Haiying Ma et al. [7] the encoding of data is done with gene string structure
where the complexity concepts are mapped to form linear symbols. The fitness func-
tion is the measure of the overall performance of the process rather than that of
individual rules when the bit strings were interpreted as a complex process. Adaptive
exchange probability (Pc) and mutation probability (Pm) are adopted in this paper.
Hong Guo et al. [8] adopt the method of adaptive mutation rate to avoid excessive
variation causing non-convergence, or into a local optimal solution. A sort of indi-
vidual-based selection method is applied to the evolution in genetic algorithm, in or-
der to prevent the high-fitness individuals converging early by the rapid growth of the
number of individual.
As the parameters of the genetic algorithm and the fitness function are found to be
the major area of interest in the above studies, this paper tries to explore on the effects
of the genetic parameters and the controlling variables of fitness function on three
different datasets.
A brief introduction about Association Rule Mining and GA is given in Section 2,
followed by methodology in section 3, which describes the basic implementation de-
tails of Association Rule Mining with GA. In section 4 the parameters that decides on
efficiency of the algorithm is presented. Section 5 presents the experimental results
followed by conclusion in the last section.
Association Rule Mining Using Genetic Algorithm: The role of Estimation Parameters 641

2 Association Rules and Genetic Algorithms

2.1 Association Rules

Association rule is a popular and well researched method for discovering interesting
relations between variables in large databases. It studies the frequency of items occur-
ring together in transactional databases, and based on a threshold called support, iden-
tifies the frequent item sets. Another threshold, confidence, which is the conditional
probability that an item appears in a transaction when another item appears, is used to
pinpoint association rules.
The discovered association rules are of the form: P Q [s, c], where P and Q are
conjunctions of attribute value-pairs, and s (for support) is the probability that P and
Q appear together in a transaction and c (for confidence) is the conditional probability
that Q appears in a transaction when P is present.

2.2 Genetic Algorithm

A Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a procedure used to find approximate solutions to

search problems through the application of the principles of evolutionary biology.
Genetic algorithms use biologically inspired techniques such as genetic inheritance,
natural selection, mutation, and sexual reproduction (recombination, or crossover).
Genetic algorithms are typically implemented using computer simulations in
which an optimization problem is specified. For this problem, members of a space of
candidate solutions, called individuals, are represented using abstract representations
called chromosomes. The GA consists of an iterative process that evolves a working
set of individuals called a population towards an objective function, or fitness func-
tion. Traditionally, solutions are represented using fixed length strings especially bi-
nary strings, but alternative encodings have also been developed.

3 Methodology
The evolutionary process of GA is a highly simplified and stylized simulation of the
biological version. It starts from a population of individuals randomly generated ac-
cording to some probability distribution, usually uniform and updates this population
in steps called generations. In each generation, multiple individuals are randomly se-
lected from the current population based on application of fitness, crossover, and
modified through mutation to form a new population.

A. [Start] Generate random population of n chromosomes.

B. [Fitness] Evaluate the fitness f(x) of each chromosome x in the population.
C. [New population] Create a new population by repeating the following steps until
the new population is complete.
i. [Selection] Select two parent chromosomes from a population according
to their fitness.
ii. [Crossover] With a crossover probability alter the parents to form a new
offspring.
642 K. Indira and S. Kanmani

iii. [Mutation] With a mutation probability mutate new offspring at each lo-
cus.
iv. [Accepting] Place new offspring in a new population
D. [Replace] Use newly generated population for a further run of the algorithm
E. [Test] If the end condition is satisfied, stop, and return the best solution in cur-
rent population
F. [Loop] Go to step B

4 Parameters in Genetic Algorithm

The GA parameters are the key components enabling the system to achieve good
enough solution for possible terminating conditions.

4.1 Encoding

Encoding is the process of representing individual solutions. The most common way
of encoding is binary encoding. Here each chromosome encodes a binary string where
each bit in the string represents some characteristics of the solution. Other encoding
schemes are octal, hexadecimal, permutation value and tree encoding.

4.2 Population

Population refers to the number of chromosomes taken up for optimization. A chro-

mosome is the raw genetic information that the GA deals with. If there are too few
chromosomes, GA has few possibilities to perform crossover and only a small part of
search space is explored. On the other hand, if there are too many chromosomes, GA
slows down. The initial population generation and population size are the two aspects
of population. The initial population is either selected randomly from the data or se-
lected with prior knowledge on the data.
The population size is calculated by

(1)

Where = number of chromosomes in data and k is the average size of the schema of
interest. If uniform crossover is adopted we can most likely get with population size
at least twice as small as the number of instances in the dataset.

4.3 Selection

During each successive generation, a proportion of the existing population is selected

to breed a new generation. Individuals are selected through a fitness-based process,
where fitter solutions as measured by a fitness function are typically more likely to be
selected. The Tournament, Roulette Wheel, Random, Rank and Boltzmann selection
are the commonly used selection methods. Elitism and stochastic universal sampling
significantly improves the GA’s performance.
Association Rule Mining Using Genetic Algorithm: The role of Estimation Parameters 643

4.4 Fitness Function

A fitness function is a particular type of objective function that prescribes the optimal-
ity of a chromosome in a genetic algorithm, so that the particular chromosome may be
ranked against all the other chromosomes [9, 10]. An ideal fitness function correlates
closely with the algorithm's goal, and yet may be computed quickly. Speed of execu-
tion is very important, as a typical genetic algorithm must be iterated many times in
order to produce an usable result for a non-trivial problem.
This paper adopts minimum support and minimum confidence for filtering rules.
Then correlative degree is confirmed in rules which satisfy minimum support-degree
and minimum confidence-degree. After support-degree and confidence-degree are
synthetically taken into account, fit degree function is defined as follows.

. . (2)

，
In the above formula, Rs + Rc =1 (Rs ≥0 Rc ≥ 0) and Suppmin, Confmin are respec-
tive values of minimum support and minimum confidence. By all appearances if the
Suppmin and Confmin are set to higher values, then the value of fitness function is also
found to be high.

4.5 Crossover Operator

Crossover entails choosing two individuals to swap segments of their code, producing
artificial "offspring" that are combinations of their parents. This process is intended to
simulate the analogous process of recombination that occurs to chromosomes during
sexual reproduction. Common forms of crossover include single-point crossover, in
which a point of exchange is set at a random location in the two individual genomes,
where one individual contributes all its code till the point of crossover, the second
individual contributes all its code after the point of crossover to produce an offspring,
and uniform crossover, in which the value at any given location in the offspring's ge-
nome is either the value of one parent's genome at that location or the value of the
other parent's genome at that location, chosen with 50/50 probability[8].

4.6 Mutation Operator

Partial gene values of individuals are adjusted by using mutation operation [5]. This
part of the genetic algorithm, require great care, here there are two probabilities, one
usually called as Pm, this probability will be used to judge whether mutation has to be
done or not, when the candidate fulfills this criterion it will be fed to another probabil-
ity, the locus probability that is on which point of the candidate the mutation has to be
done.

4.7 Number of Generations

The generational process of mining association rules by Genetic algorithm is repeated

until a termination condition has been reached. Common terminating conditions are:
644 K. Indira and S. Kanmani

A solution is found that satisfies minimum criteria.

• Fixed number of generations reached.
• Allocated budget (computation time/money) reached.
• The highest ranking solution's fitness is reaching or has reached a plateau
such that successive iterations no longer produce better results.
• Manual inspection.
• Combinations of the above.

5 Experimental Studies
The objective of this study is to compare the accuracy achieved in datasets by varying
the GA Parameters. The encoding of chromosome is binary encoding with fixed
length. As the crossover is performed on attribute level the mutation rate is set to zero
so as to retain the original attribute values. The selection method used is tournament
selection. The fitness function adopted is as given in equation (1).
Three datasets namely Lenses, Haberman survival and Iris Data Set from UCI Ma-
chine Learning Repository have been taken up for experimentation. Lenses dataset
has 4 attributes with 24 instances. Haberman's Survival data Set has 3 attributes and
306 instances and Iris dataset has 5 attributes and 150 instances. The Algorithm is
implemented using MATLAB R2008a simulation package. The flow of the system is
as shown in flowchart below.

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ǀĂůƵĂƚĞĨŝƚŶĞƐƐ


zĞƐ 

^ĂƚŝƐĨLJŽŶƐƚƌĂŝŶƚƐ

EŽ


^ĞůĞĐƚ^ƵƌǀŝǀŽƌƐ ƌŽƐƐŽǀĞƌ



KƵƚƉƵƚZĞƐƵůƚƐ

Fig. 1. Flow chart of the GA

The default values set for the GA parameters are given in Table 1.
The accuracy and the convergence rate by controlling the GA parameters are rec-
orded in the table 2. Accuracy is the count of dataset matching between the original
dataset and resulting population divided by the number of instances in dataset. The
convergence rate is the generation at which the fitness value becomes fixed. The pop-
ulation size is varied for the three dataset, from the size of the dataset to one and half
times the dataset size while keeping the other parameters fixed.
Association Rule Mining Using Genetic Algorithm: The role of Estimation Parameters 645

Table 1. Default GA Parameters

Parameter Value
Population Size Instances * 1.5
Crossover Rate 0.5
Mutation Rate 0.0
Selection Method Tournament Selection
Minimum Support 0.2
Minimum Confidence 0.8

Table 2. Comparison based on variation in population Size

No. of Instances No. of Instances * 1.25 No. of Instances *1.5

Accuracy No. of Accuracy No. of Accuracy No. of
% Generations % Generations % Generations
Lenses 75 7 82 12 95 17
Haberman 71 114 68 88 64 70
Iris 77 88 87 53 82 45

It could be seen from Table 2 that for the Lenses dataset whose size is small, an op-
timal accuracy is achieved, when the population size is one and half times the size of
the dataset whereas for the larger dataset, Haberman the accuracy is maximum when
the population size is equivalent to dataset size. For the Iris dataset of moderate size
the population has to be set to 1.25 times the size of the dataset to achieve optimum
result.
As the fitness function is considered to be the crucial factor for the GA, variations
are introduced in the fitness function while other parameters remain unchanged. In
Table 3 the minimum confidence and support values are altered when others are at
default values and the results are recorded.
From the Table 3 it is clear that the variation in minimum support and confidence
brings greater changes in accuracy. When the values of minimum support and confi-
dence are set to minimum, the accuracy if found to be low regardless of the size of the
dataset. The same is noted when both the values are set to maximum. Optimum accu-
racy is achieved when a tradeoff value between minimum confidence and minimum
support is set.

Table 3. Comparison based on variation in Minimum Support and Confidence

Minimum Support & Minimum Confidence

Sup = 0.4 & Sup =0.9 & Sup = 0.9 & Sup = 0.2 &
con =0.4 con =0.9 con = 0.2 con = 0.9
Accuracy No. Accuracy No. Accuracy No. Accuracy No.
% of % of % of % of
Gen. Gen. Gen. Gen.
Lenses 22 20 49 11 70 21 95 18
Haberman 45 68 58 83 71 90 62 75
Iris 40 28 59 37 78 48 87 55
646 K. Indira and S. Kanm
mani

When the parameters Rs and Rc are altered in the fitness function, minimum alteera-
tions in accuracy are noted and hence their impact is not taken up for analysis.
In Table 4 the crossover probability is altered when other GA parameters are seet to
default values and the results observed are recorded.

Table 4. Com
mparison based on variation in Crossover Probability

Cross Over
Pc = .2
25 Pc = .5 Pc = .75
Accuracy No. of Accuracy No. of Accuracy % No. of
% Generations % Generations Generationns
Lenses 95 8 95 16 95 13
Haberman 69 77 71 83 70 80
Iris 84 45 86 51 87 55

From the Table 4 it is evvident that the accuracy achieved is almost same for all the
three datasets whatever the crossover probability adopted. The effect of the crossoover
probability on convergencee rate is noticeable, the data size and population size beeing
set also alters the convergen
nce rate.
The results observed arre compared for the three datasets as shown in figurees 2
and 3.

Fig. 2. Population Size Vs

V Accuracy Fig. 3. Minimum Support and Confidennce
Vs Accuracy

The values of the GA parameters

p set for the three datasets when maximum eeffi-
ciency is achieved is shown
n in Table 5.

Table 5. Comparison of the optimum value of Parameters for maximum Accuracy achieveed

Dataset No. of No. of Minimum Minimum Crossover Accuraccy

Instances attrributes Support confidence rate in %
Lenses 24 4 0.2 0.9 0.25 95
Haberman 306 3 0.9 0.2 0.5 71
Iris 150 5 0.2 0.9 0.75 87
Association Rule Mining Using Genetic Algorithm: The role of Estimation Parameters 647

It is observed from the experimental analysis that the choice of optimum popula-
tion size for better accuracy depends upon the number of instances in dataset. If data-
set size is larger, then the population size same as the number of instances in dataset is
found to produce better accuracy.
Setting up values for minimum support and confidence depends on the dataset and
their relationship between attributes. Tradeoff between minimum confidence and min-
imum support has to be scored to attain optimum results. Cross over rate affects the
convergence rate of the system mainly and has minimum effect on the accuracy of the
system.

6 Conclusion
Genetic Algorithms have been used to solve difficult optimization problems in a
number of fields and have proved to produce optimum results in mining Association
rules. When Genetic algorithm is used for mining association rules the GA parameters
decides the efficiency of the system. Minimum support, minimum confidence and
population size are the key parameters deciding the accuracy of the system. The set-
ting of the population size is based on the size of the problem under study, whereas
the minimum confidence and minimum support to be set depends upon the problem
under study. The optimum value of crossover rate leads to earlier convergence while
playing minimum role in achieving better accuracy. The setting of optimum value of
the GA parameters varies from data to data and the fitness function plays a major role
in optimizing the results. The size of the dataset and relationship between attributes in
data contributes to the setting up of the parameters. The efficiency of the methodolo-
gy could be further explored on more datasets with varying attribute sizes.

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