Genetic algorithm based framework for mining fuzzy association rules

It is not an easy task to know a priori the most appropriate fuzzy sets that cover the domains of quantitative attributes for fuzzy association rules mining, simply because characteristics of quantitative data are in general unknown. Besides, it is unrealistic that the most appropriate fuzzy sets can always be provided by domain experts. Motivated by this, in this paper we propose an automated method for mining fuzzy association rules. For this purpose, we first present a genetic algorithm (GA) based clustering method that adjusts centroids of the clusters, which are to be handled later as midpoints of triangular membership functions. Next, we give a different method for generating the membership functions by using Clustering Using Representatives (CURE) clustering algorithm, which is known as one of the most efficient clustering algorithms described in the literature. Finally, we compared the proposed GA-based approach with other approaches from the literature. Experiments conducted on 100K transactions from the US census in the year 2000 show that the proposed method exhibits a good performance in terms of execution time and interesting fuzzy association rules. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.