Numerical Association Rule Mining: A Systematic Literature Review

Numerical association rule mining is a widely used variant of the association rule mining technique, and it has been extensively used in discovering patterns and relationships in numerical data. Initially, researchers and scientists integrated numerical attributes in association rule mining using various discretization approaches; however, over time, a plethora of alternative methods have emerged in this field. Unfortunately, the increase of alternative methods has resulted into a significant knowledge gap in understanding diverse techniques employed in numerical association rule mining -- this paper attempts to bridge this knowledge gap by conducting a comprehensive systematic literature review. We provide an in-depth study of diverse methods, algorithms, metrics, and datasets derived from 1,140 scholarly articles published from the inception of numerical association rule mining in the year 1996 to 2022. In compliance with the inclusion, exclusion, and quality evaluation criteria, 68 papers were chosen to be extensively evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, this systematic literature review is the first of its kind to provide an exhaustive analysis of the current literature and previous surveys on numerical association rule mining. The paper discusses important research issues, the current status, and future possibilities of numerical association rule mining. On the basis of this systematic review, the article also presents a novel discretization measure that contributes by providing a partitioning of numerical data that meets well human perception of partitions.

A comprehensive review of visualization methods for association rule mining: Taxonomy, Challenges, Open problems and Future ideas

Association rule mining is intended for searching for the relationships between attributes in transaction databases. The whole process of rule discovery is very complex, and involves pre-processing techniques, a rule mining step, and post-processing, in which visualization is carried out. Visualization of discovered association rules is an essential step within the whole association rule mining pipeline, to enhance the understanding of users on the results of rule mining. Several association rule mining and visualization methods have been developed during the past decades. This review paper aims to create a literature review, identify the main techniques published in peer-reviewed literature, examine each method's main features, and present the main applications in the field. Defining the future steps of this research area is another goal of this review paper.

Time series numerical association rule mining variants in smart agriculture

Numerical association rule mining offers a very efficient way of mining association rules, where algorithms can operate directly with categorical and numerical attributes. These methods are suitable for mining different transaction databases, where data are entered sequentially. However, little attention has been paid to the time series numerical association rule mining, which offers a new technique for extracting association rules from time series data. This paper presents a new algorithmic method for time series numerical association rule mining and its application in smart agriculture. We offer a concept of a hardware environment for monitoring plant parameters and a novel data mining method with practical experiments. The practical experiments showed the method's potential and opened the door for further extension.

A brief overview of swarm intelligence-based algorithms for numerical association rule mining

Numerical Association Rule Mining is a popular variant of Association Rule Mining, where numerical attributes are handled without discretization. This means that the algorithms for dealing with this problem can operate directly, not only with categorical, but also with numerical attributes. Until recently, a big portion of these algorithms were based on a stochastic nature-inspired population-based paradigm. As a result, evolutionary and swarm intelligence-based algorithms showed big efficiency for dealing with the problem. In line with this, the main mission of this chapter is to make a historical overview of swarm intelligence-based algorithms for Numerical Association Rule Mining, as well as to present the main features of these algorithms for the observed problem. A taxonomy of the algorithms was proposed on the basis of the applied features found in this overview. Challenges, waiting in the future, finish this paper.

Association rules over time

Decisions made nowadays by Artificial Intelligence powered systems are usually hard for users to understand. One of the more important issues faced by developers is exposed as how to create more explainable Machine Learning models. In line with this, more explainable techniques need to be developed, where visual explanation also plays a more important role. This technique could also be applied successfully for explaining the results of Association Rule Mining.This Chapter focuses on two issues: (1) How to discover the relevant association rules, and (2) How to express relations between more attributes visually. For the solution of the first issue, the proposed method uses Differential Evolution, while Sankey diagrams are adopted to solve the second one. This method was applied to a transaction database containing data generated by an amateur cyclist in past seasons, using a mobile device worn during the realization of training sessions that is divided into four time periods. The results of visualization showed that a trend in improving performance of an athlete can be indicated by changing the attributes appearing in the selected association rules in different time periods.

Discovering associations in COVID-19 related research papers

A COVID-19 pandemic has already proven itself to be a global challenge. It proves how vulnerable humanity can be. It has also mobilized researchers from different sciences and different countries in the search for a way to fight this potentially fatal disease. In line with this, our study analyses the abstracts of papers related to COVID-19 and coronavirus-related-research using association rule text mining in order to find the most interestingness words, on the one hand, and relationships between them on the other. Then, a method, called information cartography, was applied for extracting structured knowledge from a huge amount of association rules. On the basis of these methods, the purpose of our study was to show how researchers have responded in similar epidemic/pandemic situations throughout history.

Information cartography in association rule mining

Association Rule Mining is a data mining method for discovering the interesting relations between attributes in a huge transaction database. Typically, algorithms for association rule mining generate a huge number of association rules, from which it is hard to extract structured knowledge and automatically present this in a form that would be suitable for the user. Recently, an information cartography has been proposed for creating structured summaries of information and visualizing with methodology called "metro maps". This was applied to many problem domains. In the hope of widening its applicability domain, the aim of this study is to develop a method for the automatic creation of metro maps of information obtained by association rule mining. Although the proposed method consists of multiple steps, its core presents metro map construction that is defined in the study as an optimization problem, which is solved using an evolutionary algorithm. Finally, this was applied to four well-known UCI Machine Learning datasets and one sport dataset. Visualizing the resulted metro maps not only justifies the fact this is a suitable tool for presenting structured knowledge hidden in data, but also that they can even tell stories to users.

Population-based metaheuristics for Association Rule Text Mining

Nowadays, the majority of data on the Internet is held in an unstructured format, like websites and e-mails. The importance of analyzing these data has been growing day by day. Similar to data mining on structured data, text mining methods for handling unstructured data have also received increasing attention from the research community. The paper deals with the problem of Association Rule Text Mining. To solve the problem, the PSO-ARTM method was proposed, that consists of three steps: Text preprocessing, Association Rule Text Mining using population-based metaheuristics, and text postprocessing. The method was applied to a transaction database obtained from professional triathlon athletes' blogs and news posted on their websites. The obtained results reveal that the proposed method is suitable for Association Rule Text Mining and, therefore, offers a promising way for further development.

Making up for the deficit in a marathon run

To predict the final result of an athlete in a marathon run thoroughly is the eternal desire of each trainer. Usually, the achieved result is weaker than the predicted one due to the objective (e.g., environmental conditions) as well as subjective factors (e.g., athlete's malaise). Therefore, making up for the deficit between predicted and achieved results is the main ingredient of the analysis performed by trainers after the competition. In the analysis, they search for parts of a marathon course where the athlete lost time. This paper proposes an automatic making up for the deficit by using a Differential Evolution algorithm. In this case study, the results that were obtained by a wearable sports-watch by an athlete in a real marathon are analyzed. The first experiments with Differential Evolution show the possibility of using this method in the future.

A comprehensive review of firefly algorithms

The firefly algorithm has become an increasingly important tool of Swarm Intelligence that has been applied in almost all areas of optimization, as well as engineering practice. Many problems from various areas have been successfully solved using the firefly algorithm and its variants. In order to use the algorithm to solve diverse problems, the original firefly algorithm needs to be modified or hybridized. This paper carries out a comprehensive review of this living and evolving discipline of Swarm Intelligence, in order to show that the firefly algorithm could be applied to every problem arising in practice. On the other hand, it encourages new researchers and algorithm developers to use this simple and yet very efficient algorithm for problem solving. It often guarantees that the obtained results will meet the expectations.