Mining associations with the collective strength approach

Abstract

The large itemset model has been proposed in the literature for finding associations in a large database of sales transactions. A different method for evaluating and finding itemsets referred to as strongly collective itemsets is proposed. We propose a criterion stressing the importance of the actual correlation of the items with one another rather than their absolute level of presence. Previous techniques for finding correlated itemsets are not necessarily applicable to very large databases. We provide an algorithm which provides very good computational efficiency, while maintaining statistical robustness. The fact that this algorithm relies on relative measures rather than absolute measures such as support also implies that the method can be applied to find association rules in data sets in which items may appear in a sizeable percentage of the transactions (dense data sets), data sets in which the items have varying density, or even negative association rules.