Fuzzy Association Rules Mining Using Spark

Discovering new trends and co-occurrences in massive data is a key step when analysing social media, data coming from sensors, etc. Traditional Data Mining techniques are not able, in many occasions, to handle such amount of data. For this reason, some approaches have arisen in the last decade to develop parallel and distributed versions of previously known techniques. Frequent itemset mining is not an exception and in the literature there exist several proposals using not only parallel approximations but also Spark and Hadoop developments following the MapReduce philosophy of Big Data. When processing fuzzy data sets or extracting fuzzy associations from crisp data the implementation of such Big Data solutions becomes crucial, since available algorithms increase their execution time and memory consumption due to the problem of not having Boolean items. In this paper, we first review existing parallel and distributed algorithms for frequent itemset and association rule mining in the crisp and fuzzy case, and afterwards we develop a preliminary proposal for mining not only frequent fuzzy itemsets but also fuzzy association rules. We also study the performance of the proposed algorithm in several datasets that have been conveniently fuzzyfied obtaining promising results.