Mining Undominated Association Rules Through Interestingness Measures

The increasing growth of databases raises an urgent need for more accurate methods to better understand the stored data. In this scope, association rules were extensively used for the analysis and the comprehension of huge amounts of data. However, the number of generated rules is too large to be efficiently analyzed and explored in any further process. In order to bypass this hamper, an efficient selection of rules has to be performed. Since selection is necessarily based on evaluation, many interestingness measures have been proposed. However, the abundance of these measures gave rise to a new problem, namely the heterogeneity of the evaluation results and this created confusion to the decision. In this respect, we propose a novel approach to discover interesting association rules without favoring or excluding any measure by adopting the notion of dominance between association rules. Our approach bypasses the problem of measure heterogeneity and unveils a compromise between their evaluations. Interestingly enough, the proposed approach also avoids another non-trivial problem which is the threshold value specification. Extensive carried out experiments on benchmark datasets show the benefits of the introduced approach.