Soft Set Approach for Mining Quantitative Association Patterns in Databases

Association analysis of amino acids in molecular sequences can reveal crucial information and knowledge for understanding structure, function and interaction of proteins. The traditional methods of association rule mining like apriori, F-P Growth etc. fail to generate appropriate patterns due to inherent uncertainty present in data. The uncertainty in sequence data caused by variation in the length of sequences and lack of parameterization lead to under prediction and over prediction of the results. In this paper an attempt has been made to develop a soft set based approach for mining fuzzy association patterns in peptide sequences of dengue virus. The fuzzy set approach is employed to incorporate the degree of relationships among amino acids due to variation in length of the sequences. The soft set approach is employed to incorporate the relationship of parameters with amino acid association patterns. The 12,581 sequences of dengue virus are downloaded from NCBI and screened for redundancy to obtain non redundant 6995 sequences. The amino acid associations are explored and analyzed using soft fuzzy approach. Also the results obtained by soft fuzzy approach are compared with the results obtained individually by ordinary, fuzzy and soft set approaches. The soft fuzzy approach is able to overcome the issue of under prediction and over prediction of the results obtained by other approaches. Also the interesting association rules have been generated to predict the structure and physico chemical properties of the peptide sequences.

Soft set based association rule mining

The real world conditions of transportation pose new challenges for development of intelligent assistive systems for effective decision making. The ignorance of relationships among various attributes and parameters is one of the major causes of uncertainty in existing models of transportation problems. Fuzzy sets have been explored by various investigators to address the uncertainty issues due to relationships among various attributes. However fuzzy sets are not fully capable of dealing all kinds of uncertainty to provide intelligent solutions of transportation problems. A soft set is explored in this paper to model the uncertainty arising from the relationships of attributes with the parameters in a multimodal and multi objective transportation problem. The three modes of transportation incorporated in this model are road, rail and air. The real data set is prepared using the tariff, distance and time duration of transport available on websites of transport service agencies. The objectives are to minimize the cost and time duration of transportation. The proposed model evaluates multiple criteria using various combinations of different modes of transport to optimize the objectives of the problem. The model has been illustrated using the real data set using existing methods of solution. The soft set approach is found to be quite effective in dealing with the relationships of attributes with the parameters arising due to multi criteria decision making and leads to intelligent optimal solutions. The proposed model can be used as intelligent assistive system for decision making of multi objective and multimodal transportation problems.

A novel soft set approach in selecting clustering attribute

Association rule mining is one of the most popular pattern discovery methods used in data mining. Frequent pattern extraction is an essential step in association rule mining. Most of the proposed algorithms for extracting frequent patterns are based on the downward closure lemma concept utilizing the support and confidence framework. In this chapter we investigate an alternative method for mining frequent patterns in a transactional database. Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an unsupervised neural network that effectively creates spatially organized internal representations of the features and abstractions detected in the input space. It is one of the most popular clustering techniques, and it reveals existing similarities in the input space by performing a topology-preserving mapping. These promising properties indicate that such a clustering technique can be used to detect frequent patterns in a top-down manner as opposed to the traditional approach that employs a bottom-up lattice search. Issues that are frequently raised when using clustering technique for the purpose of finding association rules are: (i) the completeness of association rule set, (ii) the support level for the rules generated, and (iii) the confidence level for the rules generated. We present some case studies analyzing the relationships between the SOM approach and the traditional association rule framework, and propose a way to constrain the clustering technique so that the traditional support constraint can be approximated. Throughout our experiments, we have demonstrated how a clustering approach can be used for discovering frequent patterns.

The growing complications and inconsistencies in sustainable development evaluations require refined decision-making approaches that analyze vagueness in expert opinions. This research focuses on potential strategies to promote proactive environmental behaviours. This study introduces the algebraic operational laws for interval-valued complex spherical fuzzy soft sets (IVCSFSS) by incorporating membership, neutral membership, and non-membership grades. Also, we extend these laws to the interval-valued complex spherical fuzzy soft weighted average (IVCSFSWA) and interval-valued complex spherical fuzzy soft weighted geometric (IVCSFSWG) operators, along with their properties. A novel multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) technique is developed using the proposed operators. The proposed model facilitates the evaluation of alternatives across various environmental sustainability components, including air quality, biodiversity, land and agriculture, and renewable energy resources. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the IVCSFSS-based methodology outperforms traditional fuzzy and soft set approaches, offering greater flexibility and accuracy in handling environmental sustainability decision problems. The results highlight the applicability of this approach for business, government, and policy decision-makers seeking to address environmental challenges.

Internet of Things (IoT)-backed smart shopping carts are generating an extensive amount of data in shopping markets around the world. This data can be cleaned and utilized for setting business goals and strategies. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are used to efficiently extract meaningful patterns or insights from such huge amounts of data or big data. One such technique is Association Rule Mining (ARM) which is used to extract strategic information from the data. The crucial step in ARM is Frequent Itemsets Mining (FIM) followed by association rule generation. The FIM process starts by tuning the support threshold parameter from the user to produce the number of required frequent patterns. To perform the FIM process, the user applies hit and trial methods to rerun the aforesaid routine in order to receive the required number of patterns. The research community has shifted its focus towards the development of top-K most frequent patterns not using the support threshold parameter tuned by the user. Top-K most frequent patterns mining is considered a harder task than user-tuned support-threshold-based FIM. One of the reasons why top-K most frequent patterns mining techniques are computationally intensive is the fact that they produce a large number of candidate itemsets. These methods also do not use any explicit pruning mechanism apart from the internally auto-maintained support threshold parameter. Therefore, we propose an efficient TKIFIs Miner algorithm that uses depth-first search strategy for top-K identical frequent patterns mining. The TKIFIs Miner uses specialized one- and two-itemsets-based pruning techniques for topmost patterns mining. Comparative analysis is performed on special benchmark datasets, for example, Retail with 16,469 items, T40I10D100K and T10I4D100K with 1000 items each, etc. The evaluation results have proven that the TKIFIs Miner is at the top of the line, compared to recently available topmost patterns mining methods not using the support threshold parameter.

Closed frequent similar pattern mining: Reducing the number of frequent similar patterns without information loss

Incremental sequential patterns for multivariate temporal association rules mining

Association Rule Mining (ARM) is a well recognized and interesting area of research in the field of Data Mining. In ARM, significant amount of research work has been reported. On the contrary, very less work has been reported for Negative Association Rule Mining (NARM). ARM concentrates only on positive rules while NARM explores negative rules. Also, most researchers have worked with discrete transaction dataset. So, in this paper, we propose a technique called Negative and Positive Fuzzy Association Rule Mining (NP-FARM), which mines both negative and positive association rules from a fuzzy transaction dataset. NP-FARM algorithm has been implemented and the experimental results determine the optimal minimum support threshold and optimal minimum confidence threshold for the given dataset. Also, the experimental results demonstrate that, as the size of the dataset increases, a negligible change in execution time is witnessed to mine the growing dataset. Keywords: Association Rule Mining. Fuzzy Transactions, Positive and Negative Item Sets

Frequent pattern mining and consequently association rule mining is a useful technique for discovering relationships between items in databases. However, as the size of the data to be analyzed increases or the values of the pruning thresholds decrease, larger number of frequent pattern and more association rules will be generated with little information about the association rules in relation to each other. This research paper discusses a method to segment rules into different sets with no internal conflicts. The goal is to establish an effective method to reduce the difficulty for businesses to review the association rules of different customer segments, and track the behaviors of market segments based on their buying behaviors. The method established in this paper has the advantage of not needing customer information, thus removing the need for businesses to obtain customer information. This removes the threat of intrusions into customer privacy. The method also generates the rule sets based on conflicting rules, and dividing rules based on customer behaviors is more accurate than customer characteristics. The proposed method has been validated by running some tests.

Feature selection is an important preprocess for data mining. The soft set theory is a new mathematical tool to deal with uncertainties. Merging the soft set theory into the feature selection process based on rough sets facilitates the computation with equivalence classes and improves the efficiency. We propose a paired relation soft set model based on equivalence classes of the information system. Then we use it to present the lower approximate set in the form of soft sets and calculate the degree of dependency between relations. Furthermore, we give a new mapping to obtain equivalence classes of indiscernibility relations and propose a feature selection algorithm based on the paired relation soft set model. Compared to the algorithm based NSS, this algorithm shows 18.17% improvement on an average. Meantime, both of the algorithms show a good scalability.

Association rule mining (ARM) is a commonly encountred data mining method. There are many approaches to mining frequent rules and patterns from a database and one among them is heuristics. Many heuristic approaches have been proposed but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive literature review on such approaches, yet with only a limited attempt. This gap needs to be filled. This paper reviews heuristic approaches to ARM and points out their most significant strengths and weaknesses. We propose eight performance metrics, such as execution time, memory consumption, completeness, and interestingness, we compare approaches against these performance metrics and discuss our findings. For instance, comparison results indicate that SRmining, PMES, Ant‐ARM, and MDS‐H are the fastest heuristic ARM algorithms. HSBO‐TS is the most complete one, while SRmining and ACS require only one database scan. In addition, we propose a parameter, named GT‐Rank for ranking heuristic ARM approaches, and based on that, ARMGA, ASC, and Kua emerge as the best approaches. We also consider ARM algorithms and their characteristics as transactions and items in a transactional database, respectively, and generate association rules that indicate research trends in this area.This article is categorized under: Algorithmic Development > Association Rules Technologies > Association Rules Fundamental Concepts of Data and Knowledge > Motivation and Emergence of Data Mining

As opposed to quantitative association rule mining, fuzzy association rule mining is said to prevent the overestimation of boundary cases, as can be shown by small examples. Rule mining, however, becomes interesting in large databases, where the problem of boundary cases is less apparent and can be further suppressed by using sensible partitioning methods. A data-driven approach is used to investigate if there is a significant difference between quantitative and fuzzy association rules in large databases. The influence of the choice of a particular triangular norm in this respect is also examined.

Mining for association rules and frequent patterns is a central activity in data mining. However, most existing algorithms are only moderately suitable for real-world scenarios. Most strategies use parameters like minimum support, for which it can be very difficult to define a suitable value for unknown datasets. Since most untrained users are unable or unwilling to set such technical parameters, we address the problem of replacing the minimum-support parameter with top- n strategies. In our paper, we start by extending a top- n implementation of the ECLAT algorithm to improve its performance by using heuristic search strategy optimizations. Also, real-world datasets are often distributed and modern database architectures are switching from expensive SMPs to cheaper shared-nothing blade servers. Thus, most mining queries require distribution handling. Since partitioning can be forced by user-defined semantics, it is often forbidden to transform the data. Therefore, we developed an adaptive top- n frequent-pattern mining algorithm that simplifies the mining process on real distributions by relaxing some requirements on the results. We first combine the PARTITION and the TPUT algorithms to handle distributed top- n frequent-pattern mining. Then, we extend this new algorithm for distributions with real-world data characteristics. For frequent-pattern mining algorithms, equal distributions are important conditions, and tiny partitions can cause performance bottlenecks. Hence, we implemented an approach called MAST that defines a minimum absolute-support threshold. MAST prunes patterns with low chances of reaching the global top- n result set and high computing costs. In total, our approach simplifies the process of frequent-pattern mining for real customer scenarios and data sets. This may make frequent-pattern mining accessible for very new user groups. Finally, we present results of our algorithms when run on the SAP NetWeaver BW Acceleratorwith standard and real business datasets.