Multiple Minimum Support Implementations with Dynamic Matrix Apriori Algorithm for Efficient Mining of Association Rules

Data mining can be defined as the process of uncovering hidden patterns in random data that are potentially useful. The discovery of interesting association relationships among large amounts of business transactions is currently vital for making appropriate business decisions. Association rule analysis is the task of discovering association rules that occur frequently in a given transaction data set. Its task is to find certain relationships among a set of data (itemset) in the database. It has two measurements: Support and confidence values. Confidence value is a measure of rule’s strength, while support value corresponds to statistical significance. There are currently a variety of algorithms to discover association rules. Some of these algorithms depend on the use of minimum support to weed out the uninteresting rules. Other algorithms look for highly correlated items, that is, rules with high confidence. Traditional association rule mining techniques employ predefined support and confidence values. However, specifying minimum support value of the mined rules in advance often leads to either too many or too few rules, which negatively impacts the performance of the overall system. This work proposes a way to efficiently mine association rules over dynamic databases using Dynamic Matrix Apriori technique and Multiple Support Apriori (MSApriori). A modification for Matrix Apriori algorithm to accommodate this modification is proposed. Experiments on large set of data bases have been conducted to validate the proposed framework. The achieved results show that there is a remarkable improvement in the overall performance of the system in terms of run time, the number of generated rules, and number of frequent items used.