Thursday, June 6, 2013

Data mining algorithm: Association

This one is often in action, whenever we buy something online, we always sees advertisements in the form of: "People who bought A also bought ..." and a list of products.

It is most likely the system is using association to find out what product purchase were associated together.  Association looks through an object set (products in a purchase for example), and see what object attribute values tends to be together in the same object set. In English, what products appear often together in the same purchase? However, this is only the first part of association. To really make sense of the association result, one must also look into the dependency of the items. We may know someone who buys a phone usually buys the phone cover along with it, but does a person who buys a phone cover usually buys a phone along with it as well? Probably not. Thus when defining the association rule one must define the implication as well.

For more information:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174916



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