Mining Hidden Association Rules from Real-Life Data

Abstract

Association rule mining has been a highly active research field over the past decade. Extraction of frequency-related patterns has been applied to several domains. However, the way association rules are defined has limited people’s ability to obtain all the patterns of interest. In this chapter, the authors present an alternative approach that allows us to obtain new kinds of association rules that represent deviations from common behaviors. These new rules are called anomalous rules. To obtain such rules requires that we extract all the most frequent patterns together with certain extension patterns that may occur very infrequently. An approach that relies on anomalous rules has possible application in the areas of counterterrorism, fraud detection, pharmaceutical data analysis and network intrusion detection. They provide an adaption of measures of interest to our anomalous rule sets, and we propose an algorithm that can extract anomalous rules as well. Their experiments with benchmark and real-life datasets suggest that the set of anomalous rules is smaller than the set of association rules. Their work also provides evidence that our proposed approach can discover hidden patterns with good reliability.