Ant Colony Optimization for Mining Gradual Patterns

Gradual pattern extraction is a field in (KDD) Knowledge Discovery in Databases that maps correlations between attributes of a data set as gradual dependencies. A gradual dependency may take a form of "the more Attribute K , the less Attribute L". In this paper, we propose an ant colony optimization technique that uses a probabilistic approach to learn and extract frequent gradual patterns. Through computational experiments on real-world data sets, we compared the performance of our ant-based algorithm to an existing gradual item set extraction algorithm and we found out that our algorithm outperforms the later especially when dealing with large data sets.