Mining Fuzzy Multiple-Level Association Rules from Quantitative Data

Machine-learning and data-mining techniques have been developed to turn data into useful task-oriented knowledge. Most algorithms for mining association rules identify relationships among transactions using binary values and find rules at a single-concept level. Transactions with quantitative values and items with hierarchical relationships are, however, commonly seen in real-world applications. This paper proposes a fuzzy multiple-level mining algorithm for extracting knowledge implicit in transactions stored as quantitative values. The proposed algorithm adopts a top-down progressively deepening approach to finding large itemsets. It integrates fuzzy-set concepts, data-mining technologies and multiple-level taxonomy to find fuzzy association rules from transaction data sets. Each item uses only the linguistic term with the maximum cardinality in later mining processes, thus making the number of fuzzy regions to be processed the same as the number of original items. The algorithm therefore focuses on the most important linguistic terms for reduced time complexity.