Association rule mining using binary particle swarm optimization

In this paper, we developed a binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) based association rule miner. Our BPSO based association rule miner generates the association rules from the transactional database by formulating a combinatorial global optimization problem, without specifying the minimum support and minimum confidence unlike the a priori algorithm. Our algorithm generates the best M rules from the given database, where M is a given number. The quality of the rule is measured by a fitness function defined as the product of support and confidence. The effectiveness of our algorithm is tested on a real life bank dataset from commercial bank in India and three transactional datasets viz. books database, food items dataset and dataset of the general store taken from literature. Based on the results, we infer that our algorithm can be used as an alternative to the a priori algorithm and the FP-growth algorithm. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.