Association Rule Mining
work synergistically with the SOTrieIT and, through
experiments with existing prominent algorithms and
a variety of databases, we have proven the practicality
and superiority of our approach (Das, Ng, & Woon,
2001; Woon et al., 2001). In fact, our latest algorithm,
FOLD-growth, is shown to outperform FP-growth by
more than 100 times (Woon, Ng, & Lim, 2004).
FUTURE TRENDS
The data stream phenomenon will eventually become
ubiquitous as Internet access and bandwidth become in-
creasingly affordable. With keen competition, products
will become more complex with customization and more
varied to cater to a broad customer base; transaction
databases will grow in both size and complexity. Hence,
association rule mining research will certainly continue
to receive much attention in the quest for faster, more
scalable and more configurable algorithms.
CONCLUSION
Association rule mining is an important data mining
task with several applications. However, to cope with
the current explosion of raw data, data structures must
be utilized to enhance its efficiency. We have analyzed
several existing trie data structures used in association
rule mining and presented our novel trie structure, which
has been proven to be most useful and practical. What
lies ahead is the parallelization of our structure to further
accommodate the ever-increasing demands of today’s
need for speed and scalability to obtain association rules
in a timely manner. Another challenge is to design new
data structures that facilitate the discovery of trends as
association rules evolve over time. Different associa-
tion rules may be mined at different time points and, by
understanding the patterns of changing rules, additional
interesting knowledge may be discovered.
REFERENCES
Aggarwal, C. C., & Yu, P. S. (2001). A new approach
to online generation of association rules. IEEE Trans-
actions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 13(4),
527-540.
0
Agrawal, R., & Srikant, R. (1994). Fast algorithms
for mining association rules. Proceedings of the 20th
International Conference on Very Large Databases
(pp. 487-499), Chile.
Amir, A., Feldman, R., & Kashi, R. (1999). A new and
versatile method for association generation. Informa-
tion Systems, 22(6), 333-347.
Babcock, B., Babu, S., Datar, M., Motwani, R., &
Widom, J. (2002). Models and issues in data stream
systems. Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD/PODS
Conference (pp. 1-16), USA.
Brijs, T., Swinnen, G., Vanhoof, K., & Wets, G. (1999).
Using association rules for product assortment deci-
sions: A case study. Proceedings of the Fifth ACM
SIGKDD Conference (pp. 254-260), USA.
Creighton, C., & Hanash, S. (2003). Mining gene ex-
pression databases for association rules. Bioinformatics,
19(1), 79-86.
Das, A., Ng, W. K., & Woon, Y. K. (2001). Rapid as-
sociation rule mining. Proceedings of the 10th Inter-
national Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management (pp. 474-481), USA.
Dong, G., & Li, J. (1999). Efficient mining of emerging
patterns: Discovering trends and differences. Proceed-
ings of the Fifth International Conference on Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 43-52), USA.
Elliott, K., Scionti, R., & Page, M. (2003). The conflu-
ence of data mining and market research for smarter
CRM. Retrieved from http://www.spss.com/home_
page/wp133.htm
Han, J., Pei, J., Yin Y., & Mao, R. (2004). Mining fre-
quent patterns without candidate generation: A frequent-
pattern tree approach. Data Mining and Knowledge
Discovery, 8(1), 53-97.
Hidber, C. (1999). Online association rule mining.
Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conference (pp.
145-154), USA.
Knuth, D.E. (1968). The art of computer programming,
Vol. 1. Fundamental Algorithms. Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company.
Lawrence, R. D., Almasi, G. S., Kotlyar, V., Viveros, M.
S., & Duri, S. (2001). Personalization of supermarket