Mining fuzzy association rules

In his paper, we introduce a novel technique, called F-APACS, for mining jkzy association rules. &istlng algorithms involve discretizing the domains of quantitative attrilmtes into intervals so as to discover quantitative association rules. i%ese intervals may not be concise and meaning@ enough for human experts to easily obtain nontrivial knowledge from those rules discovered. Instead of using intervals, F-APACS employs linguistic terms to represent the revealed regularities and exceptions. The linguistic representation is especially usefil when those rules discovered are presented to human experts for examination. The definition of linguistic terms is based onset theory and hence we call the rides having these terms fuzzy association rules. The use of fq techniques makes F-APACS resilient to noises such as inaccuracies in physical measurements of real-life entities and missing values in the databases. Furthermore, F-APACS employs adjusted difference analysis which has the advantage that it does not require any user-supplied thresholds which are often hard to determine. The fact that F-APACS is able to mine fiuy association rules which utilize linguistic representation and that it uses an objective yet meanhg@ confidence measure to determine the interestingness of a rule makes it vety effective at the discovery of rules from a real-life transactional database of a PBX system provided by a telecommunication corporation