Multitask-based association rule mining

Recently, there has been a growing interest in association rule mining (ARM) in various fields. However, standard ARM algorithms fail to discover rules for multitask problems as they do not consider task-oriented investigation and, therefore, they ignore the correlation among the tasks. Considering this situation, this paper proposes a novel algorithm, named multitask association rule miner (MTARM), that tends to jointly discover rules by considering multiple tasks. This paper also introduces two novel concepts: single-task rule and multiple-task rule. In the first phase of the proposed approach, highly frequent local rules (single-task rules) are explored for each task separately and then these local rules are combined to produce the global result (multitask rules) using a majority voting mechanism. Experiments were conducted on four different real-world multitask learning datasets. The experimental results indicated that the proposed MTARM approach discovers more information than that of traditional ARM algorithms by jointly considering the relationships among multiple tasks.