ACCTG 6910

Building Enterprise &

Business Intelligence Systems
(e.bis)
Association Rule Mining
Olivia R. Liu Sheng, Ph.D.
Emma Eccles Jones Presidential Chair of Business
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Main Expectations

Knowledge pattern in focus

Definitions and examples
A basic method
How to tune the method
Decision support applications
When to use association rule mining

Reading T2, pp. 225 - 236

Association
Under a given condition,
a set of objects (implies) another set of objects
Examples
Retail items purchased together
Services subscribed by the same customer
Web pages a user access in a session
Courses taken by the same student
Medications prescribed by a doctor for a patient visit
Genes that are expressed at the same level
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Decision Support
Applications

Customer relationship management

Retail merchandise placement
Online retail catalog design
Website link re-organization
Fraud detection
Gene analysis for cancer prevention
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Preliminary
Set Theory
A set is a collection of objects.
E.g., set A = {3,5} and set B= {1,3,5}
Elements of a set are the objects belong to it.
E.g., 3 {3,5}, 3{1,3,5}, 3A and 3 B
Set X is a subset of set Y if any element in X belongs

to Y, denoted as X Y. E.g., A B or {3,5} {1,3,5}

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Preliminary
Two properties of set
An element in a set is counted only once
E.g., {1,3,5} = {1,3,3,5}
There is no order of elements in a set
E.g., {3,1,5} = {1,3,5}

Association Rules
Given: A database of transactions
Example of transactions:
a customers visit to a grocery store
an online purchase at a virtual store such as Amazon.com
Format of transactions:
date transaction IDcustomer ID Item
1/1/99 001
001
egg
1/1/99 001
001
milk
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Association Rules
Find: patterns in the form of association rules
Association rules : correlate the presence of one set of items (X)
with the presence of another set of items (Y), denoted as X Y
Example : {purchase egg,milk} {bread}
How to measure correlations in association rules?
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Association Rules
Itemset: a set of items, ex. {egg, milk}
Size of Itemset: number of items in that itemset.
The ratio of the number of transactions that purchases all items
in an itemset to the total number of transactions is called the
support of the itemset.

Association Rules
Example:
TID

CID

Item

Price Date

101
101
101
102
102
103
103
103

201
201
201
201
201
202
202
202

Computer
MS Office
MCSE Book
Hard disk
MCSE Book
Computer
Hard disk
MCSE Book

1500
300
100
500
100
1500
500
100

1/4/99
1/4/99
1/4/99
1/8/99
1/8/99
1/21/99
1/2199
1/2199

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Association Rules
In this example:
The support of the 2-itemset {Computer,Hard disk}
is 1/3=33.3%.
What is the support of 1-itemset {Computer}?

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Association Rules
Two important metrics for association rules:
If two itemsets X and Y co-exist in a transaction database,
the association rule XY holds with
supports s which is the ratio of
the # of transactions purchasing both X and Y
to () the total # of transactions
confidence c which is the ratio of
the # of transactions purchasing both X and Y
to () the # of transactions purchasing X only.12

Association Rules
Association rule: {Computer} {Hard disk}
Support: 1/3=33.3%
Confidence: 1/2=50%
How about {Computer} {MCSE book}
{Computer, MCSE book} {Hard disk}???

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Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining: find all association rules with support
no less than user-specified minimum support and confidence no
less than user-specified minimum confidence in a database
For small problems, the process

of mining association rules is not that complex.

How about a transaction database with 1billion transactions
and 1million different items?
An efficient algorithm is needed!

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Association Rules
Two Steps in Association rule mining:
1. Find all large or frequent itemsets that have support above
user-specified minimum support.
2. For each large itemset L, find all association rules in the
form of a(L-a) where a and (L-a) are non-empty subsets
of L.
Example: find all association rules in the example with minimum
support 60% and minimum confidence 80%.
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Association Rule Mining

Step 2 is trivial compared to step 1:
Exponential search space
Size of transaction database

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Apriori Algorithm
Apriori is an efficient algorithm to
discover all large itemsets from a huge
database with large number of items.
Apriori is developed by two researchers
from IBM Almaden Research Lab.

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Apriori Algorithm
Apriori algorithm is based on Apriori
property.

Apriori property is that any subset of a

large itemset must be large.

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Apriori Algorithm
Step 1: Scan DB one time to find all large
1-itemsets.
Step 2: Generate candidate K-itemsets
from large (k-1)-itemsets.
Step 3: Find all large k-itemsets from
candidate k-itemsets by scanning DB
once
Go back to step 2 and stop until no
cadidate itemsets can be generated.
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Apriori Algorithm
Step 2
Candidate k-itemsets are k-itemsets that could
be large.
Why generate candidate k-itemsets only from
large (k-1) itemsets?
How to generate?
Step 2-1: Join: Two large (k-1)-itemsets, L1 amd L2,
that are joinable must satisfy the following conditions:
L1(1)=L2(1) and L1(2)=L2(2) and . L1(K-2)=L2(K-2)
L1(K-1)<L2(K-1)

Step 2-2: Prune: prune itemsets generated in step 2-1

that have subset not large.
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Apriori Algorithm
Transaction ID

Items

100

1,3,4,6

200

2,3,5,7

300

1,2,3,5,8

400

2,5,9,10

500

1,4

Minimum support =40%

Minimum confidence =70%

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Association Rule Mining

Tid

items

100

1, 3, 4, 6

200

2, 3, 5, 7

300

1, 2, 3, 5, 8

400

2, 5, 9, 10

500

1, 4

Minimum Support: 40%

Large 1-itemset:
{1}

support=3/5=60%

{2}

support=3/5=60%

{3}

support=3/5=60%

{4}

support=2/5=40%

{5}

support=3/5=60%
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Association Rule Mining

Large 1-itemset:
{1}

support=3/5=60%

{2}

support=3/5=60%

{3}

support=3/5=60%

{4}

support=2/5=40%

{5}

support=3/5=60%
Candidate 2-itemset:
{1, 2}

{1, 3}

{1, 4}

{2, 3}

{2, 4}

{2, 5}

{3, 4}

{3, 5}

{4, 5}

{1, 5}

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Association Rule Mining

Candidate 2-itemset:
{1, 2}

{1, 3}

{1, 4}

{2, 3}

{2, 4}

{2, 5}

{3, 4}

{3, 5}

{1, 5}

{4, 5}
Large 2-itemset:
{1, 3}

support=2/5=40%

{1, 4}

support=2/5=40%

{2, 3}

support=2/5=40%

{2, 5}

support=3/5=60%

{3, 5}

support=2/5=40%

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Association Rule Mining

Large 2-itemset:
{1, 3}

support=2/5=40%

{1, 4}

support=2/5=40%

{2, 3}

support=2/5=40%

{2, 5}

support=3/5=60%

{3, 5}

support=2/5=40%
Candidate 3-itemset:
{1, 3, 4}
{2, 3, 5}

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Association Rule Mining

Candidate 3-itemset:
{1, 3, 4}
{2, 3, 5}
Large 3-itemset:
{2, 3, 5} support=2/5=40%

Candidate 4-itemset:
No candidate 4-itemset. Stop.

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