Chapter 2. Association Rule Mining
In our data mining toolbox, measuring the frequency of a pattern is a critical task. In some cases, more frequently occurring patterns may end up being more important patterns. If we can find frequently occurring pairs of items, or triples of items, those may be even more interesting.
In this chapter, we begin our exploration of frequent itemsets, and then we extend those to a type of pattern called association rules. We will cover the following topics:
- What is a frequent itemset? What are the techniques for finding frequent itemsets? Where are the bottlenecks and how can we speed up the process?
- How can we extend a frequent itemset to become an association rule?
- What makes a good association rule? We will learn to describe the value of a particular association rule, given its level of support in the database, our confidence in the rule itself, and the value added by the rule we found.
To do this, we will write a program to find frequent itemsets...
