THE EXTENDED ASSOCIATION RULES AND ATOM ASSOCIATION RULES

The association rules model presented by Rakesh Agrawal et al reveals the positive relationships behind the frequent items. However it doesn't give the negative relationships behind the frequent items. However, these negative relationships are as important as those positive relationships in practical applications. The model of extended association rules proposed in this paper can reveal both positive and negative relationships behind frequent items so as to mine more rules. Moreover, the association rules produced by Apriori approach include many redundant rules. Hence, the atom association rules are proposed to remove their redundancy, which can reduce the size of association rules and the time to set up rules. Several conclusions about the support of the extended association rules and the atom association rules are also proved, and their functions and meanings are explained. The experimental results show that those results are applicable, and the efficiency to mine extended association rules has been improved by combining extended and atom association rules. In particular, for mining the atom association rules, the number of association rules can be greatly reduced and the running time is saved.