On the adaptability of G3PARM to the extraction of rare association rules

摘要

To date, association rule mining has mainly focused on the discovery of frequent patterns. Nevertheless, it is often interesting to focus on those that do not frequently occur. Existing algorithms for mining this kind of infrequent patterns are mainly based on exhaustive search methods and can be applied only over categorical domains. In a previous work, the use of grammar-guided genetic programming for the discovery of frequent association rules was introduced, showing that this proposal was competitive in terms of scalability, expressiveness, flexibility and the ability to restrict the search space. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that this proposal is also appropriate for the discovery of rare association rules. This approach allows one to obtain solutions within specified time limits and does not require large amounts of memory, as current algorithms do. It also provides mechanisms to discard noise from the rare association rule set by applying four different and specific fitness functions, which are compared and studied in depth. Finally, this approach is compared with other existing algorithms for mining rare association rules, and an analysis of the mined rules is performed. As a result, this approach mines rare rules in a homogeneous and low execution time. The experimental study shows that this proposal obtains a small and accurate set of rules close to the size specified by the data miner.