Exception rules in association rule mining

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Abstract

Previously, exception rules have been defined as association rules with low support and high confidence. Exception rules are important in data mining, as they form rules that can be categorized as an exception. This is the opposite of general association rules in data mining, which focus on high support and high confidence. In this paper, a new approach to mining exception rules is proposed and evaluated. A relationship between exception and positive/negative association rules is considered, whereby the candidate exception rules are generated based on knowledge of the positive and negative association rules in the database. As a result, the exception rules exist in the form of negative, as well as positive, association. A novel exceptionality measure is proposed to evaluate the candidate exception rules. The candidate exceptions with high exceptionality form the final set of exception rules. Algorithms for mining exception rules are developed and evaluated using an exceptionality measurement, the desired performance of which has been proven.

Introduction

Exception rule mining has attracted a lot of research interest [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. Exception rules have been defined as rules with low support and high confidence [4]. A traditional example of exception rules is the rule Champagne  Caviar. The rule may not have a high support, but it has high confidence. The items are expensive so they are not frequent in the database, but they are always bought together so the rule has high confidence. Exception rules provide valuable knowledge about database patterns.

This paper presents exception rules mining based on association rules in databases. Exception rules describe unusual, contradictory knowledge in the database. An interconnection between exception rules and association rules will be explored. Based on the knowledge about association rules in the database, the exception rules will be generated. In this paper, we consider that association rules may exist in the form of positive association, as well as negative association [13], [14], [15]. Since the exception rules are the opposite of association rules, the exception rules exist in the form of negative, as well as positive, association. A novel exceptionality measure will be proposed to evaluate the reliable exception rules. The exceptions with high exceptionality are the reliable exception rules.

The significance of exception rules has been highlighted in a number of research works [4], [7], [8], [9], [10], [16]. Something that contradicts a user’s common belief is bound to be interesting. Hussain et al. [4] state that “exceptions can take an important role in making critical decisions”. Most researchers focus on association rules that represent common phenomena that occur with high support and confidence. Exceptions, despite their important role in decision making, are still foreign to many users. Exceptions are no doubt highly valuable.

Liu et al. [16] maintain that “reliable exceptions are unknown, unexpected, or contradictory to what the user believes. Hence, they are novel and potentially more interesting than strong patterns to the user”. For example, the rule ‘jobless applicants are granted credit’ will be more novel than the rule ‘jobless applicants are not granted credit’. They stress that “an exception rule is often beneficial since it differs from a common sense rule, which is often a basis for people’s daily activity”.

The above-mentioned examples demonstrate the importance of exception rules in data mining. Association rules and exception rules discover different kinds of rules. Association rules present commonsense knowledge, whereas exception rules represent surprising and unusual facts in the data.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 summarizes existing work in exception rules. Section 3 describes exception rules in detail. Section 4 presents our proposed exceptionally measure. Section 5 describes our proposed algorithm and explains the proposed methods with a detailed example. Section 6 presents our experimental results, and Section 7 gives the conclusions.

Section snippets

Existing work

Existing work on the discovery of exception rules can be classified as either (i) directed or (ii) undirected. A directed search obtains a set of exception rules each of which contradicts a user-specified belief [5], [17], [18]. An undirected search obtains a set of pairs of an exception rule and a general rule [4], [8], [9], [10], [16].

In a directed search of exception rules, user-specified beliefs are obtained first. Each of the discovered exception rules contradicts the user-supplied

Motivating examples

The general definition of an exception is ‘something unusual, something that does not conform to the rule, or something deviating from the norm’. The key terms in this general definition of an exception are the words rule and norm. Therefore, to discover an exception in the given environment, we need to know what the common rules or the norm are in the given environment. Before we start searching for exceptions in a database, we have to discover the strong rules in the database, whether they be

Proposed exceptionality measure

We propose a novel measure to distinguish the reliable exception rules from all other positive and negative exception rules. We name the novel measure the exceptionality measure. The minimum exceptionality minexcep is specified by a user along with the minimum support value minsup and minimum confidence value minconf. Exceptionality of an exception rule ExcRule given the corresponding association rule AssocRule is defined by the formula below:Exceptionality(ExcRule/AssocRule)=FuzzySup(ExcRule)+

Algorithm and examples

In this section, we present the algorithm for mining reliable exception rules. The reliable exception rules generated by the algorithm are the exception rules with high exceptionality. The algorithm is then followed by a walk-through example.

Performance evaluation

The test database was downloaded from the UCI Repository of machine learning databases [26]. The test database is the Intrusion Detection database, which is former KDD Cup 1999 data to distinguish the attacks on the network from other database records. The database represents the parameters of a network over a period of time. The original database included 40 parameters and a vast number of records. Most of the parameters are continuous. In our experimentation, the simplified model of 10

Conclusion and future work

In this paper, a novel method has been developed for mining exception rules. The interconnection between strong positive and negative association rules and exception rules is explored, where an exception rule is formed if it contradicts the strong rule, and also if it satisfies some exceptional measure. The proposed exceptionality measure is used to evaluate the candidate exception rule whose desired performance has been proven.

In the future, we are going to consider temporal exceptions, which

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