Preparing the raw data file for analysis

Now that we have had a short introduction to the association rules algorithm, we will illustrate applying association rules to a more meaningful example.

We will be using the online retail dataset, which can be obtained from the UCI machine learning repository at:

https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Online+Retail.

As described by the source, the data is:

"A transnational data set which contains all the transactions occurring between 01/12/2010 and 09/12/2011 for a UK-based and registered non-store online retail. The company mainly sells unique all-occasion gifts. Many customers of the company are wholesalers".

For more information about how the dataset was created, please refer to the original journal article (Daqing Chen, 2012).

Reading the transaction file

We will input the Groceries data using the read.csv() function.

We can use the file.show() function to directly examine the input file if needed. This is sometimes needed if you find that there are...