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.