SET-PSO-based approach for mining positive and negative association rules

Data mining is the process of determining new, unanticipated, valuable patterns from existing databases by considering historical and recent developments in statistics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. It can help companies focus on the most important information in their data warehouses. Association rule mining is one of the most highly researched and popular data mining techniques for finding associations between items in a set. It is frequently used in marketing, advertising, and inventory control. Typically, association rules only consider items in transactions (positive association rules). They do not consider items that do not occur together, which can be used to create rules that are also useful for market basket analysis. Also, existing algorithms often generate too many candidate itemsets when mining the data and scan the database multiple times. To resolve these issues in association rule mining algorithms, we propose SARIC (set particle swarm optimization for association rules using the itemset range and correlation coefficient). Our method uses set particle swarm optimization to generate association rules from a database and considers both positive and negative occurrences of attributes. SARIC applies the itemset range and correlation coefficient so that we do not need to specify the minimum support and confidence, because it automatically determines them quickly and objectively. We verified the efficiency of SARIC using two differently sized databases. Our simulation results demonstrate that SARIC generates more promising results than Apriori, Eclat, HMINE, and a genetic algorithm.