Methods and systems for mining weighted association rules

摘要

The traditional association rule problem is extended by allowing a weight to be associate with each item in a transaction to reflect interest/intensity of each item within the transaction. The weighted association rules from a set of tuple lists are discovered, where each tuple consists of an item and an associated weight and each tuple list consists multiple tuples. The weighted association rules (WARs) are generated where some subset of items forms the consequent part of the rule (i.e., right hand side of the rule) and some other (non-overlapped) subset of items from the antecedent part of the rule (i.e., left hand side of the rule). The range of the weight value of each item is specified in the said rule such that the number of tuples satisfying both the left hand side and right hand side of the rules exceeds a pre-specified support level (referred to as the support requirement) and the fraction of tuples satisfying the left hand side also satisfying the right hand side exceeds a pre-specified confidence level (referred to as the confidence requirement).