An approach to mining bundled commodities

Although bundled commodities are largely existed in supermarket, there are few investigations about bundled commodities mining. In this study, interval-valued association rules as a novel and possible approach to solving the bundled commodities mining issue, is proposed. Properties research based on interval-valued association rules is conducted, and an interval-valued rule pattern: < F, boolean OR, boolean AND > is constructed, where F denotes set of interval-valued ruses, boolean OR and boolean AND denote the disjunctive operation and conjunctive operation, respectively. Furthermore, one of the properties satisfied by the interval-valued rules: A boolean AND C = B boolean AND C and A boolean OR C = B boolean OR C <-> A = B, where A, B, C are there different rules, is validated and utilized to mine the bundled commodities. Finally, a large-scale software engineering project relative to interval-valued rule mining is implemented to merge flight testing information about aircrafts which validates the technique of mining bundled commodities can be discovered a special relation between objects. These initial investigations provide a researchable framework for bundled commodities mining. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.