Visualization as support to the extraction and exploration of association rules (Visualização como suporte à extração e exploração de regras de associação)

Since the definition of the association rule mining problem, many efficient algorithms have been introduced to deal with it. However, the problem still presents many practical difficulties to the miners, such as the determination of suitable minimum support and minimum confidence thresholds, manipulation of large rule sets, and comprehension of rules (specially those containing many items). In order to deal with these problems, researchers have been investigating the application of interactive techniques, sumarization (of rule sets) and visual representations. Nonetheless, no approach in which users can understand and control the process through interaction with the analytical algorithm along its execution has been introduced. We introduce an interactive approach to extract and explore association rules that inserts the user into the process through: interactive execution of the Apriori ; interactive selection of frequent itemsets; itemset-based and cluster-oriented extraction of rules; and pairwise exploration of rules. To validate the approach, several studies have been conducted, supported by the I2E System, aiming at: comparing the interactive approach, under several aspects, with a conventional approach to obtain association rules; evaluate the effect of different execution parameters in the final results; and illustrate its application in real situations and with real users. Results of these studies indicate that the approach is adequate, both in exploratory scenarios and in scenarios in which there is an initial guidance for the process, to the execution of certain association rule extraction tasks, because: it provides resources to avoid complete algorithm executions before