Category-Driven Association Rule Mining

The quality of rules generated by ontology-driven association rule mining algorithms is constrained by the algorithm’s effectiveness in exploiting the usually large ontology in the mining process. We present a framework built around superimposing a hierarchical graph structure on a given ontology to divide the rule mining problem into disjoint subproblems whose solutions can be iteratively joined to find global associations. We present a new metric for evaluating the interestingness of generated rules based on where their constructs fall within the ontology. Our metric is anti-monotonic on subsets, making it usable in an Apriori-like algorithm which we present here. The algorithm categorises the ontology into disjoint subsets utilising the hierarchical graph structure and uses the metric to find associations in each, joining the results using the guidance of anti-monotonicity. The algorithm optionally embeds built-in definitions of user-specified filters to reflect user preferences. We evaluate the resulting model using a large collection of patient health records.