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Mining Quantitative Association Rules on Overlapped Intervals

Conference Paper  in  Lecture Notes in Computer Science · July 2005

DOI: 10.1007/11527503_7 · Source: DBLP

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 Mining Quantitative Association Rules on
Overlapped Intervals

Qiang Tong1,3 , Baoping Yan2 , and Yuanchun Zhou1,3

1
Institute of Computing Technology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
{tongqiang, yczhou}@sdb.cnic.cn
2
Computer Network Information Center,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
ybp@mimi.cnc.ac.cn
3
Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Abstract. Mining association rules is an important problem in data

mining. Algorithms for mining boolean data have been well studied and
documented, but they cannot deal with quantitative and categorical data
directly. For quantitative attributes, the general idea is partitioning the
domain of a quantitative attribute into intervals, and applying boolean
algorithms to the intervals. But, there is a conflict between the minimum
support problem and the minimum confidence problem, while existing
partitioning methods cannot avoid the conflict. Moreover, we expect the
intervals to be meaningful. Clustering in data mining is a discovery pro-
cess which groups a set of data such that the intracluster similarity is
maximized and the intercluster similarity is minimized. The discovered
clusters are used to explain the characteristics of the data distribution.
The present paper will propose a novel method to find quantitative asso-
ciation rules by clustering the transactions of a database into clusters and
projecting the clusters into the domains of the quantitative attributes to
form meaningful intervals which may be overlapped. Experimental re-
sults show that our approach can efficiently find quantitative association
rules, and can find important association rules which may be missed by
the previous algorithms.

1 Introduction
Mining association rules is a key data mining problem and has been widely
studied [1]. Finding association rules in binary data has been well investigated
and documented [2, 3, 4]. Finding association rules in numeric or categorical
data is not as easy as in binary data. However, many real world databases
contain quantitative attributes and current solutions to this case are so far
inadequate.
An association rule is a rule of the form X ⇒ Y , where X and Y are sets
of items. It states that when X occurs in a database so does Y with a certain
probability. X is called the antecedent of the rule and Y the consequent. There

X. Li, S. Wang, and Z.Y. Dong (Eds.): ADMA 2005, LNAI 3584, pp. 43–50, 2005.
c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005
°
44 Q. Tong, B. Yan, and Y. Zhou

are two important parameters associated with an association rule: support and
confidence. Support describes the importance of the rule, while confidence de-
termines the occurrence probability of the rule. The most difficult part of an
association rule mining algorithm is to find the frequent itemsets. The process
is affected by the support parameter designated by the user.
A well known application of association rules is in market basket data anal-
ysis, which was introduced by Agrawal in 1993 [2]. In the problem of market
basket data analysis, the data are boolean, which have values of “1” or “0”. The
classical association rule mining algorithms are designed for boolean data. How-
ever, quantitative and categorical attributes widely exist in current databases.
In [5], Srikant and Agrawal proposed an algorithm dealing with quantitative at-
tributes by dividing quantitative attributes into equi-depth intervals and then
combining adjacent partitions when necessary. In other words, for a depth d, the
first d values of the attribute are placed in one interval, the next d in a second
interval, and so on. There are two problems with the current methods of parti-
tioning intervals: MinSup and MinConf [5]. If a quantitative attribute is divided
into too many intervals, the support for a single interval can be low. When the
support of an interval is below the minimum support, some rules involving the
attribute may not be found. This is the minimum support problem. Some rules
may have minimum confidence only when a small interval is in the antecedent,
and the information loss increases as the interval size becomes larger. This is the
minimum confidence problem.
The critical part of mining quantitative association rules is to divide the do-
mains of the quantitative attributes into intervals. There are several classical
dividing methods. The equi-width method divides the domain of a quantitative
attribute into n intervals, and each interval has the same length. In the equi-
depth method, there are equal number of items contained in each interval. The
equi-width method and the equi-depth method are so straightforward that the
partitions of quantitative attributes may not be meaningful, and cannot deal
with the minimum confidence problem. In [5], Srikant and Agrawal introduced
a measure of partial completeness which quantified the information lost due to
partitioning, and developed an algorithm to partition quantitative attributes.
In [6], Miller and Yang pointed out the pitfalls of the equi-depth method, and
presented several guiding principles for quantitative attribute partitioning. In
selecting intervals or groups of data to consider, they wanted to have a mea-
sure of interval quality to reflect the distance among data points. They took the
distance among data into account, since they believed that putting closer data
together was more meaningful. To achieve this goal, they presented a more gen-
eral form of an association rule, and used clustering to find subsets that made
sense by containing a set of attributes that were close enough. They proposed
an algorithm which used birch [7] to find clusters in the quantitative attributes
and used the discovered clusters to form “items”, then fed the items into the
classical boolean algorithm apriori [3]. In their algorithm, clustering was used
to determine sets of dense values in a single attribute or over a set of attributes
that were to be treated as a whole.
 Mining Quantitative Association Rules on Overlapped Intervals 45

Although Miller and Yang took the distance among data into account and
used a clustering method to make the intervals of quantitative attributes more
meaningful, they did not take the relations among other attributes into account
by clustering a quantitative attribute or a set of quantitative attributes alone.
We believe that their technique still falls shot of a desirable goal.
Based on the above analysis, we find that the partitioning method can be
further improved. On the one hand, since clustering an attribute or a set of
attributes alone is not good enough, we believe that the relations among at-
tributes should be taken into account. We tend to cluster all attributes together,
and project the clusters into the domains of the quantitative attributes. On the
other hand, the projection of the clusters on a specific attribute can be over-
lapped. We think this is reasonable. Moreover, this is a good resolution to the
conflict between the minimum support problem and the minimum confidence
problem. A small interval may result in the minimum support problem, while a
large interval may lead to the minimum confidence problem. When several over-
lapped intervals coexist in the domain of a quantitative attribute, and different
intervals are used for different rules, the conflict between the two problems which
confuses the quantitative attributes partitioning does not exist. In this paper, we
propose an approach which first applys a clustering algorithm to all attributes,
and projects the discovered clusters into the domains of all attributes to form
intervals (the intervals may be overlapped), then uses a boolean association rule
mining algorithm to find association rules.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we introduce some
definitions of the quantitative association rule mining problem and review the
background in brief. In Section 3, we present our approach and our algorithm. In
Section 4, we give the experimental results and our analysis. Finally, in Section
5, we give the conclusions and the future work.

2 Problem Description
Now, we give a formal statement of the problem of mining quantitative associa-
tion rules and introduce some definitions.
Let I = {i1 , i2 , . . . , in } be a set of attributes, and R be the set of real numbers,
IR = X × R × R , that is IR = {(x, l, u)|x ∈ I, l ∈ R, u ∈ R, l ≤ x ≤ u}. A triple
(x, l, u) ∈ IR denotes either a quantitative attribute x with a value interval [l, u],
or a categorical attribute with a value l (l = u) . Let D be a set of transactions,
where each transaction T is a set of attribute values. X ⊂ IR , if ∀(x, l, u) ∈
X, ∃(x, v) ∈ T, l ≤ v ≤ u, we say transaction T supports X. A quantitative
association rule isTan implication of the form X ⇒ Y , where X ∈ IR , Y ∈ IR ,
andS attribute(X) attribute(Y ) = ∅. If s percent of transactions in D support
X Y , and c percent of transactions which support X also support Y , we say
that the association rule has support s and confidence c respectively. The prob-
lem of mining quantitative association rules is the process of finding association
rules which meet the minimum support and the minimum confidence at a given
transaction database which contains quantitative and/or categorical attributes.
46 Q. Tong, B. Yan, and Y. Zhou

Clustering can be considered the most important unsupervised learning tech-

nique, which deals with finding a structure in a collection of unlabeled data. A
cluster is therefore a collection of objects which are “similar” to each other and
are “dissimilar” to the objects belonging to other clusters [8]. In this paper, a
cluster is a set of transactions. An important component of a clustering algorithm
is the distance measure among data points. In [6], Miller and Yang defined two
thresholds on the cluster size and the diameter. First, the diameter of a cluster
should be less than a specific value to ensure that the cluster is sufficiently dense.
Second, the number of transactions contained in a cluster should be greater than
the minimum support to ensure that the cluster is frequent. Since our clustering
approach is different, our definition of the diameter of a cluster is also different.
Definition 1. We adopt Euclidean distance as the distance metric, and the dis-
tance between two transactions is defined as
v
u n
uX
d(Ii , Ij ) = t (Iik − Ijk )2 (1)
k=1

Definition 2. A cluster C = {I1 , I2 , . . . , Im } is a set of transactions, and the

gravity center of C is defined as
m
1 X
Cg = Ii (2)
m i=1

Definition 3. The diameter of a cluster C = {I1 , I2 , . . . , Im } is defined as

m
1 X
Dg (C) = (Ii − Cg )T (Ii − Cg ) (3)
m i=1

Definition 4. The number of transactions contained in a cluster C is denoted

as |C|, d0 and s0 are thresholds for association rule mining, |C|and Dg (C) should
satisfy the following formula

|C| ≥ s0 , Dg (C) ≤ d0 (4)

The first criterion ensures that the cluster contains enough number of trans-
actions to be frequent. The second criterion ensures that the cluster is dense
enough. To ensure that clusters are isolated from each other, we will rely on a
clustering algorithm to discover clusters which are as isolated as possible.

3 The Proposed Approach

In this section, we describe our approach of mining quantitative association rules.
We divide the problem of mining quantitative association rules into several steps:
 Mining Quantitative Association Rules on Overlapped Intervals 47

1. Map the attributes of the given database to IR = I × R × R. For ordered

categorical attributes, map the values of the attribute to a set of consecutive
integers, such that the order of the attributes is preserved. For unordered
categorical attributes, we define the distance between two different attributes
as a constant value. For boolean attributes, map the values of the attributes
to “0” and “1”. For quantitative attributes, we keep the original values or
transform the values to a standard form, such as Z-Score. We adopt various
mapping methods to fit the clustering algorithm. For different data sets, we
may use different mapping methods.
2. Apply a clustering algorithm to the new database produced by the first
step. In the clustering algorithm, by dealing with the transactions as n-
dimension vectors, we take all attributes into account. In this paper, we adopt
a common clustering algorithm k-means to identify transaction groups that
are compact (the distance among transactions within a cluster is small) and
isolated (relatively separable from other groups). By clustering all attributes
together, the relations among all attributes are considered, and the clusters
may be more meaningful. Besides, we also use Definition 4 as the principle
for evaluating the quality of the discovered clusters.
3. Project the clusters into the domains of the quantitative attributes. The
projections of the clusters will form overlapped intervals. We make an in-
terval x ∈ [l, u] a new boolean attribute. The two-dimension example of the
projection is shown in Figure 1.
4. Mine association rules by using a classical boolean algorithm. Since the quan-
titative attributes have been booleanized, we can use a boolean algorithm
(such as apriori) to find frequent itemsets, and then use the frequent itemsets
to generate association rules.

I2

u1 C1
u3 C3

l1
C2
u2
l3

l2

l1 l2 u1 u2 l3 u3 I1

Fig. 1. Projecting the clusters into the domains of quantitative attributes to form
intervals, which may be overlapped
48 Q. Tong, B. Yan, and Y. Zhou

4 Experimental Results
Our experimental environment is an IBM Netfinity 5600 server with dual PIII
866 CPUs and 512M memory, which runs Linux operating system. The exper-
iment has been done over a real data set of bodyfat [10]. The attributes in the
bodyfat dataset are: density, age, weight, height, neck, chest, abdomen, hip,
thigh, knee, ankle, biceps, forearm and wrist. All of the attributes are quanti-
tative attributes. There are 252 records of various people in the dataset. Our
purpose is to find association rules over all attributes.
For our algorithm, the parameters needed from the user are the minimum
support, the minimum confidence, and the number of clusters. In our experiment,
we use minimum support of 10%, minimum confidence of 60%, and the clusters of
six. We first use a common clustering algorithm (k-means) to find clusters, then
project the clusters into the domains of the quantitative attributes, and finally
use a boolean association rule mining algorithm (apriori) to find association
rules. Some of the rules which we have found are listed in Figure 2.
From the above rules, we can see that the intervals are overlapped, which
cannot be discovered by the previous partitioning methods. The equi-width
method cannot divide some quantitative attributes properly (such as density),
because the attributes range only in a very small domain, while the equi-depth
method may put far apart transactions into the same interval. As shown in
Figure 1, our partitioning method projects the clusters into the domains of
the quantitative attributes, and forms overlapped intervals. Our method con-
siders both the distance among transactions and the relations among attributes.
For previous methods, if an interval is small, it may not meet the minimum
support; if an interval is large, it may not meet the minimum confidence. In
our method, since the intervals can be overlapped, we can avoid the conflict
between the minimum support problem and the minimum confidence prob-
lem. Moreover, since our intervals tend to be less than those of the previ-
ous methods, the boolean association rule mining algorithm works more
efficiently.

ID Rules
1 Age[40, 74]&Weight[178, 216] Ÿ Abdomen[88.7, 113.1]
2 Age[34, 42]&Weight[195.75, 224.75] Ÿ Chest[99.6, 115.6]
3 Weight[219, 363.15] Ÿ Hip[105.5, 147.7]&Chest[108.3, 136.2]
4 Weight[154, 191]&Height[65.5, 77.5] Ÿ Density[1.025, 1.09]
5 Abdomen[88.6, 111.2]&Hip[101.8, 115.5] Ÿ Weight[196,224]
6 Biceps[24.8, 38.5] & Forearm[22, 34.9] Ÿ Wrist[15.8, 18.5]
7 Thigh[54.7, 69]&Knee[34.2, 42.2] Ÿ Ankle[21.4, 33.9]
8 Weight[118.5, 159.75]&Height[64, 73.5] Ÿ Density[1.047, 1.11]

Fig. 2. Some of the rules discovered by our algorithm with the parameters (minimum
support = 10%, minimum confidence = 60%, and the number of clusters k = 6)
 Mining Quantitative Association Rules on Overlapped Intervals 49

5 Conclusions and Future Work

In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach to efficiently find quantita-
tive association rules. The critical part of quantitative association rule mining is
to partition the domains of quantitative attributes into intervals. The previous
algorithms dealt with this problem by dividing the domains of quantitative at-
tributes into equi-depth or equi-width intervals, or using a clustering algorithm
on a single attribute (or a set of attributes) alone. They cannot avoid the conflict
between the minimum support problem and the minimum confidence problem,
and risk missing some important rules. In our approach, we treat a transaction
as an n-dimension vector, and apply a common clustering algorithm to the vec-
tors, then project the clusters into the domains of the quantitative attributes to
form overlapped intervals. We finally use a classical boolean algorithm to find
association rules. Our approach takes the relations and the distances among
attributes into account, and can resolve the conflict between the minimum sup-
port problem and the minimum confidence problem by allowing intervals to be
overlapped. Experimental results show that our approach can efficiently find
quantitative association rules, and can find important association rules which
may be missed by the previous algorithms.
Since our approach adopts a common clustering algorithm and a classical
boolean association rule mining algorithm rather than integrates the two al-
gorithms together, we believe that our approach can be further improved by
integrating the clustering algorithm and the association rule mining algorithm
tightly in our future work.

Acknowledgement
This work is partially supported by the National Hi-Tech Development 863 Pro-
gram of China under grant No. 2002AA104240, and the Informatization Project
under the Tenth Five-Year Plan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under grant
No. INF105-SDB. We thank Mr. Longshe Huo and Miss Hong Pan for their help-
ful suggestions.

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