Prioritization of association rules in data mining: Multiple criteria decision approach

Data mining techniques, extracting patterns from large databases are the processes that focus on the automatic exploration and analysis of large quantities of raw data in order to discover meaningful patterns and rules. In the process of applying the methods, most of the managers who are engaging the business encounter a multitude of rules resulted from the data mining technique. In view of multi-faceted characteristics of such rules, in general, the rules are featured by multiple conflicting criteria that are directly related with the business values, such as, e.g. expected monetary value or incremental monetary value. In the paper, we present a method for rule prioritization, taking into account the business values which are comprised of objective metric or managers' subjective judgments. The proposed methodology is an attempt to make synergy with decision analysis techniques for solving problems in the domain of data mining. We believe that this approach would be particularly useful for the business managers who are suffering from rule quality or quantity problems, conflicts between extracted rules, and difficulties of building a consensus in case several managers are involved for the rule selection. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.