Linguistic data mining with fuzzy FP-trees

Due to the increasing occurrence of very large databases, mining useful information and knowledge from transactions is evolving into an important research area. In the past, many algorithms were proposed for mining association rules, most of which were based on items with binary values. Transactions with quantitative values are, however, commonly seen in real-world applications. In this paper, the frequent fuzzy pattern tree (fuzzy FP-tree) is proposed for extracting frequent fuzzy itemsets from the transactions with quantitative values. When extending the FP-tree to handle fuzzy data, the processing becomes much more complex than the original since fuzzy intersection in each transaction has to be handled. The fuzzy FP-tree construction algorithm is thus designed, and the mining process based on the tree is presented. Experimental results on three different numbers of fuzzy regions also show the performance of the proposed approach. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.