Abstract Background Associative Classification, a combination of two important and different fields (classification and association rule mining), aims at building accurate and interpretable classifiers by means of association rules. A major problem in this field is that existing proposals do not scale well when Big Data are considered. In this regard, the aim of this work is to propose adaptations of well-known associative classification algorithms (CBA and CPAR) by considering different Big Data platforms (Spark and Flink). Results An experimental study has been performed on 40 datasets (30 classical datasets and 10 Big Data datasets). Classical data have been used to find which algorithms perform better sequentially. Big Data dataset have been used to prove the scalability of Big Data proposals. Results have been analyzed by means of non-parametric tests. Results proved that CBA-Spark and CBA-Flink obtained interpretable classifiers but it was more time consuming than CPAR-Spark or CPAR-Flink. In this study, it was demonstrated that the proposals were able to run on Big Data (file sizes up to 200 GBytes). The analysis of different quality metrics revealed that no statistical difference can be found for these two approaches. Finally, three different metrics (speed-up, scale-up and size-up) have also been analyzed to demonstrate that the proposals scale really well on Big Data. Conclusions The experimental study has revealed that sequential algorithms cannot be used on large quantities of data and approaches such as CBA-Spark, CBA-Flink, CPAR-Spark or CPAR-Flink are required. CBA has proved to be very useful when the main goal is to obtain highly interpretable results. However, when the runtime has to be minimized CPAR should be used. No statistical difference could be found between the two proposals in terms of quality of the results except for the interpretability of the final classifiers, CBA being statistically better than CPAR.
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