A Discrete Crow Search Algorithm for Mining Quantitative Association Rules

Association rules are the specific data mining methods aiming to discover explicit relations between the different attributes in a large dataset. However, in reality, several datasets may contain both numeric and categorical attributes. Recently, many meta-heuristic algorithms that mimic the nature are developed for solving continuous problems. This article proposes a new algorithm, DCSA-QAR, for mining quantitative association rules based on crow search algorithm (CSA). To accomplish this, new operators are defined to increase the ability to explore the searching space and ensure the transition from the continuous to the discrete version of CSA. Moreover, a new discretization algorithm is adopted for numerical attributes taking into account dependencies probably that exist between attributes. Finally, to evaluate the performance, DCSA-QAR is compared with particle swarm optimization and mono and multi-objective evolutionary approaches for mining association rules. The results obtained over real-world datasets show the outstanding performance of DCSA-QAR in terms of quality measures.

Automatic Mining of Quantitative Association Rules with Gravitational Search Algorithm

The classical optimization algorithms are not efficient in solving complex search and optimization problems. Thus, some heuristic optimization algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, exploration of association rules within numerical databases with Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) has been firstly performed. GSA has been designed as search method for quantitative association rules from the databases which can be regarded as search space. Furthermore, determining the minimum values of confidence and support for every database which is a hard job has been eliminated by GSA. Apart from this, the fitness function used for GSA is very flexible. According to the interested problem, some parameters can be removed from or added to the fitness function. The range values of the attributes have been automatically adjusted during the time of mining of the rules. That is why there is not any requirements for the pre-processing of the data. Attributes interaction problem has also been eliminated with the designed GSA. GSA has been tested with four real databases and promising results have been obtained. GSA seems an effective search method for complex numerical sequential patterns mining, numerical classification rules mining, and clustering rules mining tasks of data mining.