Mining and prioritization of association rules for big data: multi-criteria decision analysis approach

Data mining techniques and extracting patterns from large datasets play a vital role in knowledge discovery. Most of the decision makers encounter a large number of decision rules resulted from association rules mining. Moreover, the volume of datasets brings a new challenge to extract patterns such as the cost of computing and inefficiency to achieve the relevant rules. To overcome these challenges, this paper aims to build a learning model based on FP-growth and Apache Spark framework to process and to extract relevant association rules. We also integrate the multi-criteria decision analysis to prioritize the extracted rules by taking into account the decision makers subjective judgment. We believe that this approach would be a useful model to follow, particularly for decision makers who are suffering from conflicts between extracted rules, and difficulties of building only the most interesting rules. Experimental results on road accidents analysis show that the proposed approach can be efficiently achieved more association rules with a higher accuracy rate and improve the response time of the proposed algorithm. The results make clear that the proposed approach performs well and can provide useful information that could help the decision makers to improve road safety. © 2017, The Author(s).