Mining generalized fuzzy quantitative association rules with fuzzy generalization hierarchies

Association rule mining is an exploratory learning task to discover some hidden dependency relationships among items in transaction data. Quantitative association rules denote association rules with both categorical and quantitative attributes. There have been several works on quantitative association rule mining such as the application of fuzzy techniques to quantitative association rule mining, the generalized association rule mining for quantitative association rules, and importance weight incorporation into association rule mining for taking into account the user's interest. This paper introduces a new method for generalized fuzzy quantitative association rule mining with importance weights. The method uses fuzzy concept hierarchies for categorical attributes an generalization hierarchies of fuzzy linguistic terms for quantitative attributes. It enables the users to flexibly perform the association rule mining by controlling the generalization levels for attributes and the importance weights for attributes.