Efficient Associate Rules Mining Based on Topology for Items of Transactional Data

A challenge in association rules’ mining is effectively reducing the time and space complexity in association rules mining with predefined minimum support and confidence thresholds from huge transaction databases. In this paper, we propose an efficient method based on the topology space of the itemset for mining associate rules from transaction databases. To do so, we deduce a binary relation on itemset, and construct a topology space of itemset based on the binary relation and the quotient lattice of the topology according to transactions of itemsets. Furthermore, we prove that all closed itemsets are included in the quotient lattice of the topology, and generators or minimal generators of every closed itemset can be easily obtained from an element of the quotient lattice. Formally, the topology on itemset represents more general associative relationship among items of transaction databases, the quotient lattice of the topology displays the hierarchical structures on all itemsets, and provide us a method to approximate any template of the itemset. Accordingly, we provide efficient algorithms to generate Min-Max association rules or reduce generalized association rules based on the lower approximation and the upper approximation of a template, respectively. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is an alternative and efficient method to generate or reduce association rules from transaction databases.