A reliable basis for approximate association rules

For most of the work done in developing association rule mining, the primary focus has been on the efficiency of the approach and to a lesser extent the quality of the derived rules has been emphasized. Often for a dataset, a huge number of rules can be derived, but many of them can be redundant to other rules and thus are useless in practice. The extremely large number of rules makes it difficult for the end users to comprehend and therefore effectively use the discovered rules and thus significantly reduces the effectiveness of rule mining algorithms. If the extracted knowledge can’t be effectively used in solving real world problems, the effort of extracting the knowledge is worth little. This is a serious problem but not yet solved satisfactorily. In this paper, we propose a concise representation called Reliable Approximate basis for representing non-redundant approximate association rules. We prove that the redundancy elimination based on the proposed basis does not reduce the belief to the extracted rules. We also prove that all approximate association rules can be deduced from the Reliable Approximate basis. Therefore the basis is a lossless representation of approximate association rules.