An efficient approach to categorising association rules

Association rules are a fundamental data mining technique, used for various applications. In this paper, we present an efficient method to make use of association rules for discovering knowledge from transactional data. First, we approach this problem using an ontology. The hierarchical structure of an ontology defines the generalisation relationship for the concepts of different abstraction levels that are utilised to minimise the search space. Next, we have developed an efficient algorithm, hierarchical association rule categorisation (HARC), which use a novel metric called relevance for categorising association rules. As a result, users are now able to find the needed rules efficiently by searching the compact generalised rules first and then the specific rules that belong to them rather than scanning the entire list of rules.