Efficient mining of association rules based on gravitational search algorithm

Association rules mining are one of the most used tools to discover relationships among attributes in a d atabase. A lot of algorithms have been introduced for discovering these rules. These algorithms have to mine association rules in two stages separately. Most of them mine occurrence rules which are easily predictable by the users. Therefore, this paper discusses the application of gravitational search algorithm for discovering interesting association rules. This evolutionary algorithm is based on the Newtonian gravity and the laws of motion. Furthermore, contrary to the previous methods, the proposed method in this study is able to mine the best association rules without generating frequent itemsets and is independent of the minimum support and confidence values. The results of applying this method in comparison with the method of mining association rules based upon the particle swarm optimization show that our method is successful.