Mining of Association Patterns in Social Network Data (Face Book 100 Universities) through Data Mining Techniques and Methods

Data mining involves the use of advanced data analysis tools to find out new, suitable patterns and project the relationship among the patterns which were not known prior. In data mining, association rule learning is a popular and well researched method for discovering interesting relations between variables in large databases. One of the emerging research areas under Data mining is Social Networks. The objective of this paper focuses on the formulation of association rules using which decisions can be made for future Endeavour. This research applies Apriori Algorithm which is one of the classical algorithms for deriving association rules. The Algorithm is applied to Face book 100 university dataset which has originated from Adam D'Angelo of Face book. It contains self-defined characteristics of a person including variables like residence, year, and major, second major, gender, school. This paper to begin with the research uses only ten Universities and highlights the formation of association rules between the attributes or variables and explores the association rule between a course and gender, and discovers the influence of gender in studying a course. The previous research with this dataset has applied only regression models and this is the first time to apply association rules.