Association Rule Learning

Introduction

The association rule learning is one of the very important concepts of machine learning and it is employed in Market Basket Analysis, Web usage mining, Continous production. Here market basket analysis is a technique used by the various big retailer to discover the associations between items.

We can understand it by taking an example of a supermarket, as in a supermarket, all products that are purchased together are put together. For example, if a customer buys bread, he most likely can also buy butter, eggs, or milk so these products are stored within a shelf or mostly nearby.

Prerequisites

• What is Association Rule Learning.
• How does Association Rule Work?
• Types of association Rule.
• Metrics of Association Rule.
• Types of Association Rule Algorithms.
• Types of Association Rule Learning.

People usually say that people who buy diapers must also buy juice ~ Anonymous

What is Association Rule Learning?

Association rule learning is a type of unsupervised learning technique that checks for the dependency of one data item on another data item and maps accordingly so that it can be more profitable. It tries to find some interesting relations or associations among the variables of dataset. It is based on different rules to discover the interesting relations between variables in the database.

Association rule learning can be divided into three types of algorithms:

• Apriori.
• Eclat.
• F-P Growth Algorithm.

How does Association Rule Learning Work?

---

Association rule learning works on the concept of If and Else Statement, such as if A then B.

Here the if element is called antecedent, and then the statement is called as Consequent. These types of relationships where we can find out some association or relation between two items is known as Single Cardinality. It is all about creating rules, and if the number of items increases, then cardinality also increases accordingly. So, to measure the associations between thousands of data items, there are several metrics to follow:

Metrics of association Rule

• Support
• Confidence
• Lift

Let’s understand each of them:

Support

Support is the frequency of A or how frequently an item appears in the dataset. it is defined as the fraction of the transaction T that contains the itemset X datasets, then for transactions T, it can be written as

Confidence

Confidence indicates how often the rules has been found to be true. Or how often the terms X and Y occur together in the dataset when the occurrence of X is already given. It is the ration of the transaction that contains X and Y to the number of records that contain X.

Lift

It is the strength of any rule, which can be defined as:- It is the ration of the observed support measure and expected support if X and Y are independent of each other. It has three possible values:

Types of Association Rule Algorithms

Association rule learning can be divided into three algorithms:

Apriori Algorithm

This algorithm uses frequent datasets to generate association rules. It is designed to work on the datasets that contain transactions. This algorithm uses a breadth-first search and Hash Tree to calculate the itemset efficiently.

It is mainly used for market basket analysis and helps to understand the products that can be bought together. it can also be used in the healthcare industry to find drug reactions for patients.

Eclat Algorithm

Eclat algorithm stands for Equivalence Class Transformation. This algorithm uses a depth-first search technique to find frequent itemsets in a transaction database. It performs faster execution than Apriori Algorithm.

F-P Growth Algorithm

The F-P growth algorithm stands for Frequent Pattern, and it is the improved version the Apriori Algorithm. It represents the database in the form of a tree structure that is known as a frequent pattern or tree. The purpose of this frequent tree is to extract the most frequent patterns.

Applications of Association Rule Learning

It has various applications in machine learning and data mining. Below are some of the popular applications of association rule learning:

Market Basket Analysis: It is one of the popular examples and applications association rule mining. This technique is commonly used by big retailers to determine the association between items.

Medical Diagnosis: With the help of association rules, patients can be cured easily, as it helps in identifying the probability of illness for a particular disease.

Protein Sequence: The association rules help in determining the synthesis of artificial proteins.

It is also used for the Catalog Design and Loss-leader Analysis and many ore other applications.

For Python Implementation of Association Rule Click Here

************Thanks for Reading Give me a Thumb*******