UNIT-2

Association Rules

Association rule mining

Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases
Mining multidimensional association rules from transactional databases and data
warehouse

From association mining to correlation analysis

Constraint-based association mining
 Lecture
Association rule mining
 What Is Association Mining?

• Association rule mining

– Finding frequent patterns, associations, correlations, or

causal structures among sets of items or objects in
transaction databases, relational databases, and other
information repositories.

• Applications

– Basket data analysis, cross-marketing, catalog design, loss-

leader analysis, clustering, classification, etc.

Lecture-27 - Association rule mining

 Association Mining

• Rule form
prediction (Boolean variables) =>
prediction (Boolean variables) [support,
confidence]
– Computer => antivirus_software [support =2%,
confidence = 60%]
– buys (x, “computer”) ® buys (x,
“antivirus_software”) [0.5%, 60%]

Lecture-27 - Association rule mining

 Association Rule: Basic Concepts

• Given a database of transactions each transaction is a

list of items (purchased by a customer in a visit)
• Find all rules that correlate the presence of one set of
items with that of another set of items
• Find frequent patterns
• Example for frequent itemset mining is market basket
analysis.
 Association rule performance measures

• Confidence
• Support
• Minimum support threshold
• Minimum confidence threshold

Lecture-27 - Association rule mining

 Rule Measures: Support and Confidence
Customer
Customer • Find all the rules X & Y  Z with minimum
buys both
buys diaper confidence and support
– support, s, probability that a transaction
contains {X  Y  Z}
– confidence, c, conditional probability that a
transaction having {X  Y} also contains Z
Customer
buys beer

Let minimum support 50%, and

Transaction ID Items Bought minimum confidence 50%, we have
2000 A,B,C 
A  C (50%, 66.6%)
1000 A,C 
C  A (50%, 100%)
4000 A,D
5000 B,E,F

Lecture-27 - Association rule mining

 Martket Basket Analysis

• Shopping baskets
• Each item has a Boolean variable representing the
presence or absence of that item.
• Each basket can be represented by a Boolean vector
of values assigned to these variables.
• Identify patterns from Boolean vector
• Patterns can be represented by association rules.

Lecture-27 - Association rule mining

 Association Rule Mining: A Road Map
• Boolean vs. quantitative associations
- Based on the types of values handled
– buys(x, “SQLServer”) ^ buys(x, “DMBook”) => buys(x,
“DBMiner”) [0.2%, 60%]
– age(x, “30..39”) ^ income(x, “42..48K”) => buys(x, “PC”) [1%,
75%]
• Single dimension vs. multiple dimensional associations
• Single level vs. multiple-level analysis

Lecture-27 - Association rule mining

 Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean
association rules from transactional
databases
 Apriori Algorithm
• Single dimensional, single-level, Boolean
frequent item sets
• Finding frequent item sets using candidate
generation
• Generating association rules from frequent
item sets

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 Mining Association Rules—An Example

Transaction ID Items Bought Min. support 50%

2000 A,B,C Min. confidence 50%
1000 A,C
4000 A,D Frequent Itemset Support
{A} 75%
5000 B,E,F
{B} 50%
{C} 50%
For rule A  C: {A,C} 50%
support = support({A C}) = 50%
confidence = support({A C})/support({A}) = 66.6%
The Apriori principle:
Any subset of a frequent itemset must be frequent

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 Mining Frequent Itemsets: the Key Step
• Find the frequent itemsets: the sets of items that
have minimum support
– A subset of a frequent itemset must also be a frequent
itemset
• i.e., if {AB} is a frequent itemset, both {A} and {B}
should be a frequent itemset
– Iteratively find frequent itemsets with cardinality from 1
to k (k-itemset)
• Use the frequent itemsets to generate association
rules.
Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 The Apriori Algorithm

• Join Step
– Ck is generated by joining Lk-1with itself

• Prune Step
– Any (k-1)-itemset that is not frequent cannot be a
subset of a frequent k-itemset

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 The Apriori Algorithm

• Pseudo-code:
Ck: Candidate itemset of size k
Lk : frequent itemset of size k

L1 = {frequent items};
for (k = 1; Lk != ; k++) do begin
Ck+1 = candidates generated from Lk;
for each transaction t in database do
increment the count of all candidates in Ck+1 that are
contained in t
Lk+1 = candidates in Ck+1 with min_support
end
return  k Lk;

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 The Apriori Algorithm — Example
Database D itemset sup.
L1 itemset sup.
TID Items C1 {1} 2 {1} 2
100 134 {2} 3 {2} 3
200 235 Scan D {3} 3 {3} 3
300 1235 {4} 1 {5} 3
400 25 {5} 3
C2 itemset sup C2 itemset
L2 itemset sup {1 2} 1 Scan D {1 2}
{1 3} 2 {1 3} 2 {1 3}
{2 3} 2 {1 5} 1 {1 5}
{2 3} 2 {2 3}
{2 5} 3
{2 5} 3 {2 5}
{3 5} 2
{3 5} 2 {3 5}
C3 itemset Scan D L3 itemset sup
{2 3 5} {2 3 5} 2
Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 How to Generate Candidates?
• Suppose the items in Lk-1 are listed in an order
• Step 1: self-joining Lk-1
insert into Ck
select p.item1, p.item2, …, p.itemk-1, q.itemk-1
from Lk-1 p, Lk-1 q
where p.item1=q.item1, …, p.itemk-2=q.itemk-2, p.itemk-1 < q.itemk-1

• Step 2: pruning
forall itemsets c in Ck do
forall (k-1)-subsets s of c do
if (s is not in Lk-1) then delete c from Ck
Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 How to Count Supports of Candidates?
• Why counting supports of candidates a problem?
– The total number of candidates can be very huge
– One transaction may contain many candidates
• Method
– Candidate itemsets are stored in a hash-tree
– Leaf node of hash-tree contains a list of itemsets and
counts
– Interior node contains a hash table
– Subset function: finds all the candidates contained in a
transaction

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 Example of Generating Candidates

• L3={abc, abd, acd, ace, bcd}

• Self-joining: L3*L3
– abcd from abc and abd
– acde from acd and ace

• Pruning:
– acde is removed because ade is not in L3

• C4={abcd}

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 Methods to Improve Apriori’s Efficiency
• Hash-based itemset counting
– A k-itemset whose corresponding hashing bucket count is below the
threshold cannot be frequent

• Transaction reduction
– A transaction that does not contain any frequent k-itemset is useless
in subsequent scans

• Partitioning
– Any itemset that is potentially frequent in DB must be frequent in at
least one of the partitions of DB

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 Methods to Improve Apriori’s Efficiency

• Sampling
– mining on a subset of given data, lower support threshold
+ a method to determine the completeness

• Dynamic itemset counting

– add new candidate itemsets only when all of their subsets
are estimated to be frequent

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 Mining Frequent Patterns Without Candidate
Generation

• Compress a large database into a compact, Frequent-Pattern

tree (FP-tree) structure
– highly condensed, but complete for frequent pattern mining
– avoid costly database scans
• Develop an efficient, FP-tree-based frequent pattern mining
method
– A divide-and-conquer methodology: decompose mining tasks into
smaller ones
– Avoid candidate generation: sub-database test only

Lecture-28
Mining single-dimensional Boolean association rules from transactional databases
 Lecture-29
Mining multilevel association rules
from transactional databases
 Mining various kinds of association rules

• Mining Multilevel association rules

– Concepts at different levels
• Mining Multidimensional association rules
– More than one dimensional
• Mining Quantitative association rules
– Numeric attributes

Lecture-29 - Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases

 Multiple-Level Association Rules
• Items often form hierarchy. Food
• Items at the lower level are
expected to have lower support. milk bread
• Rules regarding itemsets at
appropriate levels could be quite skim 2% wheat white
useful.
• Transaction database can be Fraser Sunset
encoded based on dimensions
TID Items
and levels
T1 {111, 121, 211, 221}
• We can explore shared multi-
T2 {111, 211, 222, 323}
level mining
T3 {112, 122, 221, 411}
T4 {111, 121}
T5 {111, 122, 211, 221, 413}
Lecture-29 - Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases
 Multi-level Association
• Uniform Support- the same minimum support for all
levels
– + One minimum support threshold. No need to
examine itemsets containing any item whose
ancestors do not have minimum support.
– – Lower level items do not occur as frequently. If
support threshold
• too high  miss low level associations
• too low  generate too many high level
associations

Lecture-29 - Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases

 Multi-level Association

• Reduced Support- reduced minimum support

at lower levels
– There are 4 search strategies:
• Level-by-level independent
• Level-cross filtering by k-itemset
• Level-cross filtering by single item
• Controlled level-cross filtering by single item

Lecture-29 - Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases

 Uniform Support

Multi-level mining with uniform support

Level 1 Milk
min_sup = 5%
[support = 10%]

Level 2 2% Milk Skim Milk

min_sup = 5% [support = 6%] [support = 4%]

Back
Lecture-29 - Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases
 Reduced Support

Multi-level mining with reduced support

Level 1 Milk
min_sup = 5%
[support = 10%]

Level 2 2% Milk Skim Milk

min_sup = 3% [support = 6%] [support = 4%]

Lecture-29 - Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases

 Multi-level Association: Redundancy Filtering

• Some rules may be redundant due to “ancestor”

relationships between items.
• Example
– milk  wheat bread [support = 8%, confidence = 70%]
– 2% milk  wheat bread [support = 2%, confidence = 72%]
• We say the first rule is an ancestor of the second rule.
• A rule is redundant if its support is close to the
“expected” value, based on the rule’s ancestor.

Lecture-29 - Mining multilevel association rules from transactional databases

 Lecture-30
Mining multidimensional association
rules from transactional databases
and data warehouse
 Multi-Dimensional Association

• Single-dimensional rules
buys(X, “milk”)  buys(X, “bread”)

• Multi-dimensional rules
– Inter-dimension association rules -no repeated predicates
age(X,”19-25”)  occupation(X,“student”)  buys(X,“coke”)
– hybrid-dimension association rules -repeated predicates
age(X,”19-25”)  buys(X, “popcorn”)  buys(X, “coke”)

Lecture-30 - Mining multidimensional association rules from transactional databases and

data warehouse
 Multi-Dimensional Association

• Categorical Attributes
– finite number of possible values, no ordering
among values
• Quantitative Attributes
– numeric, implicit ordering among values

Lecture-30 - Mining multidimensional association rules from transactional databases and

data warehouse
 Techniques for Mining MD Associations
• Search for frequent k-predicate set:
– Example: {age, occupation, buys} is a 3-predicate set.
– Techniques can be categorized by how age are treated.
1. Using static discretization of quantitative attributes
– Quantitative attributes are statically discretized by using
predefined concept hierarchies.
2. Quantitative association rules
– Quantitative attributes are dynamically discretized into
“bins”based on the distribution of the data.
3. Distance-based association rules
– This is a dynamic discretization process that considers the
distance between data points.

Lecture-30 - Mining multidimensional association rules from transactional databases and

data warehouse
 Static Discretization of Quantitative Attributes

Discretized prior to mining using concept hierarchy.

Numeric values are replaced by ranges.
In relational database, finding all frequent k-predicate sets
will require k or k+1 table scans.
Data cube is well suited for mining.
()
The cells of an n-dimensional cuboid correspond to
the predicate sets. (age) (income) (buys)

Mining from data cubescan be much faster.

(age, income) (age,buys) (income,buys)

Lecture-30 - Mining multidimensional association rules from(age,income,buys)

transactional databases and
data warehouse
 Quantitative Association Rules
Numeric attributes are dynamically discretized

Such that the confidence or compactness of the rules
mined is maximized.
2-D quantitative association rules: Aquan1  Aquan2 
Acat
Cluster “adjacent”
association rules
to form general
rules using a 2-D
grid.
Example:
age(X,”30-34”)  income(X,”24K -
48K”)
 buys(X,”high resolution TV”)
Lecture-30 - Mining multidimensional association rules from transactional databases and data warehouse
 Lecture-31
From association mining to
correlation analysis
Interestingness Measurements
• Objective measures
– Two popular measurements
support
confidence

• Subjective measures
A rule (pattern) is interesting if
*it is unexpected (surprising to the user); and/or
*actionable (the user can do something with it)

Lecture-31 - From association mining to correlation analysis

 Criticism to Support and Confidence
• Example
– Among 5000 students
• 3000 play basketball
• 3750 eat cereal
• 2000 both play basket ball and eat cereal
– play basketball  eat cereal [40%, 66.7%] is misleading because the
overall percentage of students eating cereal is 75% which is higher than
66.7%.
– play basketball  not eat cereal [20%, 33.3%] is far more accurate,
although with lower support and confidence

basketball not basketball sum(row)

cereal 2000 1750 3750
not cereal 1000 250 1250
sum(col.) 3000 2000 5000

Lecture-31 - From association mining to correlation analysis

 Criticism to Support and Confidence
• Example
– X and Y: positively correlated,
– X and Z, negatively related
– support and confidence of X 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
X=>Z dominates Y 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
• We need a measure of dependent or
correlated events Z 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
P ( A B )
corrA, B 
P ( A) P ( B )
• P(B|A)/P(B) is also called the lift of rule A =>
B RuleSupport Confidence
X=>Y 25% 50%
X=>Z 37.50% 75%
Lecture-31 - From association mining to correlation analysis
 Other Interestingness Measures: Interest
• Interest (correlation, lift) P( A  B)
P ( A) P ( B )
– taking both P(A) and P(B) in consideration
– P(A^B)=P(B)*P(A), if A and B are independent events
– A and B negatively correlated, if the value is less than 1;
otherwise A and B positively correlated

X 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 Itemset Support Interest

X,Y 25% 2
Y 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
X,Z 37.50% 0.9
Z 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Y,Z 12.50% 0.57

Lecture-31 - From association mining to correlation analysis

 Lecture-32
Constraint-based association mining
 Constraint-Based Mining

• Interactive, exploratory mining

• kinds of constraints
– Knowledge type constraint- classification, association, etc.
– Data constraint: SQL-like queries
– Dimension/level constraints
– Rule constraint
– Interestingness constraints

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Rule Constraints in Association Mining
• Two kind of rule constraints:
– Rule form constraints: meta-rule guided mining.
• P(x, y) ^ Q(x, w) ® takes(x, “database systems”).
– Rule (content) constraint: constraint-based query
optimization (Ng, et al., SIGMOD’98).
• sum(LHS) < 100 ^ min(LHS) > 20 ^ count(LHS) > 3 ^ sum(RHS) > 1000

• 1-variable vs. 2-variable constraints

– 1-var: A constraint confining only one side (L/R) of the rule,
e.g., as shown above.
– 2-var: A constraint confining both sides (L and R).
• sum(LHS) < min(RHS) ^ max(RHS) < 5* sum(LHS)

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Constrain-Based Association Query
• Database: (1) trans (TID, Itemset ), (2) itemInfo (Item, Type, Price)
• A constrained asso. query (CAQ) is in the form of {(S1, S2 )|C },
– where C is a set of constraints on S1, S2 including frequency constraint
• A classification of (single-variable) constraints:
– Class constraint: S  A. e.g. S  Item
– Domain constraint:
• S v,   {  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  }. e.g. S.Price < 100
• v S,  is  or  . e.g. snacks  S.Type
• V S, or S V,   {  ,  ,  ,  ,  }
– e.g. {snacks, sodas }  S.Type
– Aggregation constraint: agg(S)  v, where agg is in {min, max,
sum, count, avg}, and   { , , , , ,  }.
• e.g. count(S1.Type)  1 , avg(S2.Price)  100

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Constrained Association Query Optimization
Problem
• Given a CAQ = { (S1, S2) | C }, the algorithm should be :
– sound: It only finds frequent sets that satisfy the given
constraints C
– complete: All frequent sets satisfy the given constraints C
are found
• A naïve solution:
– Apply Apriori for finding all frequent sets, and then to test
them for constraint satisfaction one by one.
• Our approach:
– Comprehensive analysis of the properties of constraints
and try to push them as deeply as possible inside the
frequent set computation.

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Anti-monotone and Monotone Constraints

• A constraint Ca is anti-monotone iff. for any

pattern S not satisfying Ca, none of the super-
patterns of S can satisfy Ca

• A constraint Cm is monotone iff. for any pattern

S satisfying Cm, every super-pattern of S also
satisfies it

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Succinct Constraint

• A subset of item Is is a succinct set, if it can be

expressed as p(I) for some selection predicate p,
where  is a selection operator
• SP2I is a succinct power set, if there is a fixed
number of succinct set I1, …, Ik I, s.t. SP can be
expressed in terms of the strict power sets of I1, …, Ik
using union and minus
• A constraint Cs is succinct provided SATCs(I) is a
succinct power set

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Convertible Constraint

• Suppose all items in patterns are listed in a total

order R
• A constraint C is convertible anti-monotone iff a
pattern S satisfying the constraint implies that each
suffix of S w.r.t. R also satisfies C
• A constraint C is convertible monotone iff a pattern S
satisfying the constraint implies that each pattern of
which S is a suffix w.r.t. R also satisfies C

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

Relationships Among Categories of
Constraints

Succinctness

Anti-monotonicity Monotonicity

Convertible constraints

Inconvertible constraints
Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining
 Property of Constraints: Anti-Monotone
• Anti-monotonicity: If a set S violates the constraint,
any superset of S violates the constraint.
• Examples:
– sum(S.Price)  v is anti-monotone
– sum(S.Price)  v is not anti-monotone
– sum(S.Price) = v is partly anti-monotone
• Application:
– Push “sum(S.price)  1000” deeply into iterative frequent
set computation.

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Characterization of
Anti-Monotonicity Constraints

S  v,   { , ,  } yes
vS no
SV no
SV yes
SV partly
min(S)  v no
min(S)  v yes
min(S)  v partly
max(S)  v yes
max(S)  v no
max(S)  v partly
count(S)  v yes
count(S)  v no
count(S)  v partly
sum(S)  v yes
sum(S)  v no
sum(S)  v partly
avg(S)  v,   { , ,  } convertible
(frequent constraint) (yes)
Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining
Example of Convertible Constraints: Avg(S)  V

• Let R be the value descending order over the

set of items
– E.g. I={9, 8, 6, 4, 3, 1}
• Avg(S)  v is convertible monotone w.r.t. R
– If S is a suffix of S1, avg(S1)  avg(S)
• {8, 4, 3} is a suffix of {9, 8, 4, 3}
• avg({9, 8, 4, 3})=6  avg({8, 4, 3})=5
– If S satisfies avg(S) v, so does S1
• {8, 4, 3} satisfies constraint avg(S)  4, so does {9, 8, 4,
3}

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

 Property of Constraints: Succinctness
• Succinctness:
– For any set S1 and S2 satisfying C, S1  S2 satisfies C
– Given A1 is the sets of size 1 satisfying C, then any set S
satisfying C are based on A1 , i.e., it contains a subset belongs
to A1 ,
• Example :
– sum(S.Price )  v is not succinct
– min(S.Price )  v is succinct
• Optimization:
– If C is succinct, then C is pre-counting prunable. The
satisfaction of the constraint alone is not affected by the
iterative support counting.

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining

Characterization of Constraints by
Succinctness
S  v,   { , ,  } Yes
vS yes
S V yes
SV yes
SV yes
min(S)  v yes
min(S)  v yes
min(S)  v yes
max(S)  v yes
max(S)  v yes
max(S)  v yes
count(S)  v weakly
count(S)  v weakly
count(S)  v weakly
sum(S)  v no
sum(S)  v no
sum(S)  v no
avg(S)  v,   { , ,  } no
(frequent constraint) (no)

Lecture-32 - Constraint-based association mining