Visual Data Mining for Discovering Association Rules

Abstract

Both visualization and data mining have become important tools in discovering hidden relationships in large data sets, and in extracting useful knowledge and information from large databases. Even though many algorithms for mining association rules have been researched extensively in the past decade, they do not incorporate users in the association-rule mining process. Most of these algorithms generate a large number of association rules, some of which are not practically interesting. This chapter presents a new technique that integrates visualization into the mining association rule process. Users can apply their knowledge and be involved in finding interesting association rules through interactive visualization, after obtaining visual feedback as the algorithm generates association rules. In addition, the users gain insight and deeper understanding of their data sets, as well as control over mining meaningful association rules.