Multi-objective genetic algorithm based approaches for mining optimized fuzzy association rules

Association rules form one of the most widely used techniques to discover correlations among attribute in a database. So far, some efficient methods have been proposed to obtain these rules with respect to an optimal goal, such as: to maximize the number of large itemsets and interesting rules or the values of support and confidence for the discovered rules. This paper first introduces optimized fuzzy association rule mining in terms of three important criteria; strongness, interestingness and comprehensibility. Then, it proposes multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (GA) based approaches for discovering these optimized rules. Optimization technique according to given criterion may be one of two different forms; The first tries to determine the appropriate fuzzy sets of quantitative attributes in a prespecified rule, which is also called as certain rule. The second deals with finding both uncertain rules and their appropriate fuzzy sets. Experimental results conducted on a real data set show the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.