Mining Temporal Association Rules with Temporal Soft Sets

Traditional association rule extraction may run into some difficulties due to ignoring the temporal aspect of the collected data. Particularly, it happens in many cases that some item sets are frequent during specific time periods, although they are not frequent in the whole data set. In this study, we make an effort to enhance conventional rule mining by introducing temporal soft sets. We define temporal granulation mappings to induce granular structures for temporal transaction data. Using this notion, we define temporal soft sets and their Q -clip soft sets to establish a novel framework for mining temporal association rules. A number of useful characterizations and results are obtained, including a necessary and sufficient condition for fast identification of strong temporal association rules. By combining temporal soft sets with NegNodeset-based frequent item set mining techniques, we develop the negFIN-based soft temporal association rule mining (negFIN-STARM) method to extract strong temporal association rules. Numerical experiments are conducted on commonly used data sets to show the feasibility of our approach. Moreover, comparative analysis demonstrates that the newly proposed method achieves higher execution efficiency than three well-known approaches in the literature.

Time-Aware CF and Temporal Association Rule-Based Personalized Hybrid Recommender System

Most recommender systems usually combine several recommendation methods to enhance the recommendation accuracy. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a best-known personalized recommendation technique. While temporal association rule-based recommendation algorithm can discover users' latent interests with time-specific leveraging historical behavior data without domain knowledge. The concept-drifting and user interest-drifting are two key problems affecting the recommendation performance. Aiming at the above problems, a time-aware CF and temporal association rule-based personalized hybrid recommender system, TP-HR, is proposed. The proposed time-aware CF algorithm considers evolving features of users' historical feedback. And time-aware users' similar neighbors selecting measure and time-aware item rating prediction function are proposed to keep track of the dynamics of users' preferences. The proposed temporal association rule-based recommendation algorithm considers the time context of users' historical behaviors when mining effective temporal association rules. Experimental results on real datasets show the feasibility and performance improvement of the proposed hybrid recommender system compared to other baseline approaches.

An Approach for Estimating the Opportunity Cost Using Temporal Association Rule Mining and Clustering

Timely identification of newly emerging trends is needed in business process. Data mining techniques are best suited for the classification, useful patterns extraction and predications which are very important for business support and decision making. Some research studies have also extended the usage of this concept in inventory management to determine opportunity cost based on association rules. Yet, not many research studies have considered the application of the data mining approach on evaluating penalty cost which is also a significant factor to the manager for optimal inventory control. In this paper, two different cases for evaluating penalty cost based on cross-selling effect are presented. An example is illustrated to validate the results.

Modified Ranking With Temporal Association Rule Mining in Supply Chains

This article deals with data mining applications for the supply chain inventory management. ABC classification is usually used for inventory items classification because the number of inventory items is so large that it is not computationally feasible to set stock and service control guidelines for each individual item. Moreover, in ABC classification, the inter-relationship between items is not considered. But practically, the sale of one item could affect the sale of other items (cross selling effect). Hence, within time-periods, the inventories should be classified. In this article, a modified approach is proposed considering both time-periods and cross-selling effect to rank inventory items. A numerical example and an empirical study with a data set are used to evaluate the proposed approach. It is illustrated that by using this modified approach, the ranking of items may get affected resulting in higher profit.

Temporal Association Rule Mining and Updating and Their Application to Blast Furnace in the Steel Industry

Blast furnace (BF) is the main method of modern iron-making. Ensuring the stability of the BF conditions can effectively improve the quality and output of iron and steel. However, operations of BF depend on mainly human experience, which causes two problems: (1) human experience is not objective and is difficult to inherit and learn and (2) it is difficult to acquire knowledge that contains time information among multiple variables in BF. To address these problems, a data-driven method is proposed. In this article, we propose a novel and efficient algorithm for discovering underlying knowledge in the form of temporal association rules (TARs) in BF iron-making data. First, a new TAR mining framework is proposed for mining temporal frequent patterns. Then, a novel TAR mining algorithm is proposed for mining underlying, up-to-date, and effective knowledge in the form of TARs. Finally, considering the updating of the BF database, a rule updating method is proposed that is based on the algorithm that is proposed in this article. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the proposed algorithm in discovering TARs in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Experiments on BF iron-making data have demonstrated the superior performance and practicability of the proposed method.

Mining Changes in Temporal Patterns in Latest Time Window for Knowledge Discovery

Temporal Association Rule mining uncovers time integrated associations in a transactional database. However, in an environment where database is regularly updated, maintenance of rules is a challenging process. Earlier algorithms suggested for maintaining frequent patterns either suffered from the problem of repeated scanning or the problem of larger storage space. Therefore, this paper proposes an algorithm “Probabilistic Incremental Temporal Association Rule Mining (PITARM)” that uncovers the changed behaviour in an updated database to maintain the rules efficiently. The proposed algorithm defines two support measures to identify itemsets expected to be frequent in the successive segment in advance. It reduces unnecessary scanning of itemsets in the entire database through three-fold verification and avoids generating redundant supersets and power sets from infrequent itemsets. Implementation of pruning technique in incremental mining is a novel approach that makes it better than earlier incremental mining algorithms and consequently reduces search space to a great extent. It scans the entire database only once, thus reducing execution time. Experimental results confirm that it is an enhancement over earlier algorithms.