When dealing with time continuous processes, the discovered
association rules may change significantly over time. This often
reflects a change in the process as well. Therefore, two questions
arise: What kind of deviation occurs in the association rules
over time, and how could these temporal rules be presented
efficiently? To address this problem of representation, we propose
a method of visualizing temporal association rules in a virtual
model with interactive exploration. The presentation form is
a three-dimensional correlation matrix, and the visualization
methods used are brushing and glyphs. Interactive functions
used for displaying rule attributes and exploring temporal rules
are implemented by utilizing Virtual Reality Modeling Language
v2 mechanisms. Furthermore, to give a direction of rule potential
for the user, the rule statistical interestingness is evaluated
on the basis of combining weighted characteristics of rule and
rule matrix. A constraint-based association rule mining tool
which creates the virtual model as an output is presented,
including the most relevant experiences from the development
of the tool. The applicability of the overall approach has been
verified by using the developed tool for data mining on a hot
strip mill of a steel plant.
