Definition
| transaction ID | milk | bread | butter | beer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 5 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Following the original definition by Agrawal et al. the problem of association rule mining is defined as: Let be a set of binary attributes called items. Let be a set of transactions called the database. Each transaction in has a unique transaction ID and contains a subset of the items in . A rule is defined as an implication of the form where and . The sets of items (for short itemsets) and are called antecedent (left-hand-side or LHS) and consequent (right-hand-side or RHS) of the rule respectively.
To illustrate the concepts, we use a small example from the supermarket domain. The set of items is and a small database containing the items (1 codes presence and 0 absence of an item in a transaction) is shown in the table to the right. An example rule for the supermarket could be meaning that if butter and bread are bought, customers also buy milk.
Note: this example is extremely small. In practical applications, a rule needs a support of several hundred transactions before it can be considered statistically significant, and datasets often contain thousands or millions of transactions.
Read more about this topic: Association Rule Learning
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Mothers often are too easily intimidated by their children’s negative reactions...When the child cries or is unhappy, the mother reads this as meaning that she is a failure. This is why it is so important for a mother to know...that the process of growing up involves by definition things that her child is not going to like. Her job is not to create a bed of roses, but to help him learn how to pick his way through the thorns.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It’s a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only definition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was “mine.””
—Jane Adams (20th century)