Generalized association rule mining using an efficient data structure

The goal of this paper is to use an efficient data structure to find the generalized association rules between the items at different levels in a taxonomy tree under the assumption that the original frequent itemsets and association rules were generated in advance. The primary challenge of designing an efficient mining algorithm is how to make use of the original frequent itemsets and association rules to directly generate new generalized association rules, rather than rescanning the database. In the paper, we used an efficient data structure called the frequent closed enumeration table (FCET) to store the relevant information. It stores only maximal itemsets, and can be used to derive the information of the subset itemsets in a maximal itemset through a hash function. In the proposed algorithms GMAR and GMFI, we used join methods and/or pruning techniques to generate new generalized association rules. Through several comprehensive experiments, we found that both algorithms are much better than BASIC and Cumulate algorithms also using the efficient data structure (FCET), owing to fewer candidate itemsets generated by GMAR and GMFI. Furthermore, the GMAR algorithm prunes a large amount of irrelevant rules based on the minimum confidence. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.