Patterns of Associations in Finite Sets of Items

Wagner R. Patterns of Associations in Finite Sets of Items. In: Batagelj V, Bock H-H, Ferligoj A, Ziberna A, eds. Data Science and Classification (Proceedings of the 10th IFCS Conference). Studies in classification, data analysis, and knowledge organization. Berlin: Springer; 2006: 279-286.Mining association rules is well established in quantitative business research literature and makes up an up-and-coming topic in marketing practice. However, reducing the analysis to the assessment and interpretation of a few selected rules does not provide a complete picture of the data structure revealed by the rules. This paper introduces a new approach of visualizing relations between items by assigning them to a rectangular grid with respect to their mutual association. The visualization task leads to a quadratic assignment problem and is tackled by means of a genetic algorithm. The methodology is demonstrated by evaluating a set of rules describing marketing practices in Russia