Data Mining:

Association Rules Techniques

May 10, 2023 1

 What Is Association Mining?

 Association rule mining:

 Finding frequent patterns, associations, correlations among
sets of items or objects in transaction databases, relational
databases, and other information repositories.
 Applications:
 Basket data analysis, cross-marketing, catalog design, loss-
leader analysis, clustering, classification, etc.
 Examples.
 Rule form: “Body ead [support, confidence]”.
 buys(x, “diapers”)  buys(x, “beers”) [0.5%, 60%]
 major(x, “CS”) ^ takes(x, “DB”) grade(x, “A”) [1%, 75%]

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 Association Rule: Basic Concepts

 Given: (1) database of transactions, (2) each transaction is a

list of items (purchased by a customer in a visit)
 Find: all rules that correlate the presence of one set of items
with that of another set of items
 E.g., 98% of people who purchase tires and auto

accessories also get automotive services done

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 Rule Measures: Support and
Confidence
Customer Customer
buys both
 Find all the rules X & Y  Z with
buys diaper
minimum confidence and support
 support, s, probability that a

transaction contains {X, Y, Z}

 confidence, c, conditional

Customer probability that a transaction

buys beer having {X, Y} also contains Z

Transaction ID Items Bought Let minimum support 50%, and

2000 A,B,C minimum confidence 50%, we have
 A  C (50%, 66.6%)
1000 A,C
 C  A (50%, 100%)
4000 A,D
5000 B,E,F
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 Association Rule Mining: A Road Map

 Boolean vs. quantitative associations (Based on the

types of values handled)
 buys(x, “SQLServer”) ^ buys(x, “DMBook”)
buys(x, “DBMiner”) [0.2%, 60%]
 age(x, “30..39”) ^ income(x, “42..48K”) buys(x,
“PC”) [1%, 75%]
 Single dimension vs. multiple dimensional associations
(see ex. Above)
 Single level vs. multiple-level analysis
 What brands of beers are associated with what
brands of diapers?
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 Mining Association Rules—An Example

Transaction ID Items Bought Min. support 50%

2000 A,B,C Min. confidence 50%
1000 A,C
4000 A,D Frequent Itemset Support
{A} 75%
5000 B,E,F
{B} 50%
{C} 50%
For rule A  C : {A,C} 50%
support = support({A, C}) = 50%
confidence = support({A, C})/support({A}) = 66.6%
The Apriori principle:
Any subset of a frequent itemset must be frequent
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 Mining Frequent Itemsets: the
Key Step
 Find the frequent itemsets: the sets of items that have
minimum support
 A subset of a frequent itemset must also be a frequent
itemset
 i.e., if {AB} is a frequent itemset, both {A} and {B} should be a
frequent itemset
 Iteratively find frequent itemsets with cardinality from 1 to k
(k-itemset)
 Use the frequent itemsets to generate association rules.

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 The Apriori Algorithm
 Join Step: Ck is generated by joining Lk with itself
-1

 Prune Step: Any (k-1)-itemset that is not frequent cannot be a subset of a

frequent k-itemset
 Pseudo-code:
Ck: Candidate itemset of size k
Lk : frequent itemset of size k
L1 = {frequent items};
for (k = 1; Lk !=; k++) do begin
Ck+1 = candidates generated from Lk;
for each transaction t in database do
increment the count of all candidates in Ck+1 that are
contained in t
Lk+1 = candidates in Ck+1 with min_support
end
return k Lk;

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 The Apriori Algorithm — Example
Database D itemset sup.
L1 itemset sup.
TID Items C1 {1} 2 {1} 2
100 134 {2} 3 {2} 3
200 235 Scan D {3} 3 {3} 3
300 1235 {4} 1 {5} 3
400 25 {5} 3
C2 itemset sup C2 itemset
L2 itemset sup {1 2} 1 Scan D {1 2}
{1 3} 2 {1 3} 2 {1 3}
{2 3} 2 {1 5} 1 {1 5}
{2 3} 2 {2 3}
{2 5} 3
{2 5} 3 {2 5}
{3 5} 2
{3 5} 2 {3 5}
C3 itemset Scan D L3 itemset sup
{2 3 5} {2 3 5} 2
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 Interestingness Measurements
 Objective measures
Two popular measurements:
 support; and

 confidence

 Subjective measures (Silberschatz & Tuzhilin,

KDD95)
A rule (pattern) is interesting if
 it is unexpected (surprising to the user); and/or

 actionable (the user can do something with it)

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 Criticism to Support and Confidence
 Example 1: (Aggarwal & Yu, PODS98)
 Among 5000 students

3000 play basketball

3750 eat cereal

2000 both play basket ball and eat cereal
 play basketball  eat cereal [40%, 66.7%] is misleading

because the overall percentage of students eating cereal is 75%

which is higher than 66.7%.
 play basketball  not eat cereal [20%, 33.3%] is far more

accurate, although with lower support and confidence

basketball not basketball sum(row)
cereal 2000 1750 3750
not cereal 1000 250 1250
sum(col.) 3000 2000 5000
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 Criticism to Support and Confidence
(Cont.)
 Example 2:
 X and Y: positively correlated, X 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
 X and Z, negatively related Y 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
 support and confidence of
Z 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
X=>Z dominates
 We need a measure of dependent
or correlated events Rule Support Confidence
P ( A B) X=>Y 25% 50%
corrA, B 
P ( A) P( B) X=>Z 37.50% 75%
 P(B|A)/P(B) is also called the lift
of rule A => B
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Other Interestingness Measures: Interest
 Interest (correlation, lift) P( A  B)
P ( A) P ( B )
 taking both P(A) and P(B) in consideration
 P(A^B)=P(B)*P(A), if A and B are independent events
 A and B negatively correlated, if the value is less than 1;
otherwise A and B positively correlated
Itemset Support Interest
X 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
X,Y 25% 2
Y 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 X,Z 37.50% 0.9
Z 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Y,Z 12.50% 0.57

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 Summary

 Association rule mining

 probably the most significant contribution from the
database community in KDD
 A large number of papers have been published
 Many interesting issues have been explored
 An interesting research direction
 Association analysis in other types of data: spatial
data, multimedia data, time series data, etc.

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