Valency Based Weighted Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining is an important data mining task that discovers relationships among items in a transaction database. Most approaches to association rule mining assume that all items within a dataset have a uniform distribution with respect to support. Therefore, weighted association rule mining (WARM) was introduced to provide a notion of importance to individual items. Previous approaches to the weighted association rule mining problem require users to assign weights to items. This is infeasible when millions of items are present in a dataset. In this paper we propose a method that is based on a novel Valency model that automatically infers item weights based on interactions between items. Our experimentation shows that the weighting scheme results in rules that better capture the natural variation that occurs in a dataset when compared to a miner that does not employ such a weighting scheme.