Constraining and summarizing association rules in medical data

Association rules are a data mining technique used to discover frequent patterns in a data set. In this work, association rules are used in the medical domain, where data sets are generally high dimensional and small. The chief disadvantage about mining association rules in a high dimensional data set is the huge number of patterns that are discovered, most of which are irrelevant or redundant. Several constraints are proposed for filtering purposes, since our aim is to discover only significant association rules and accelerate the search process. A greedy algorithm is introduced to compute rule covers in order to summarize rules having the same consequent. The significance of association rules is evaluated using three metrics: support, confidence and lift. Experiments focus on discovering association rules on a real data set to predict absence or existence of heart disease. Constraints are shown to significantly reduce the number of discovered rules and improve running time. Rule covers summarize a large number of rules by producing a succinct set of rules with high-quality metrics.