Online mining of fuzzy multidimensional weighted association rules

This paper addresses the integration of fuzziness with On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) based association rules mining. It contributes to the ongoing research on multidimensional online association rules mining by proposing a general architecture that utilizes a fuzzy data cube for knowledge discovery. A data cube is mainly constructed to provide users with the flexibility to view data from different perspectives as some dimensions of the cube contain multiple levels of abstraction. The first step of the process described in this paper involves introducing fuzzy data cube as a remedy to the problem of handling quantitative values of dimensional attributes in a cube. This facilitates the online mining of fuzzy association rules at different levels within the constructed fuzzy data cube. Then, we investigate combining the concepts of weight and multiple-level to mine fuzzy weighted multi-cross-level association rules from the constructed fuzzy data cube. For this purpose, three different methods are introduced for single dimension, multidimensional and hybrid (integrates the other two methods) fuzzy weighted association rules mining. Each of the three methods utilizes a fuzzy data cube constructed to suite the particular method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in this direction. We compared the proposed approach to an existing approach that does not utilize fuzziness. Experimental results obtained for each of the three methods on a synthetic dataset and on the adult data of the United States census in year 2000 demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed fuzzy OLAP based mining approach. OLAP is one of the most popular tools for on-line, fast and effective multidimensional data analysis. In the OLAP framework, data is mainly stored in data hypercubes (simply called cubes).