Association Mining and Formal Concept Analysis

In this paper, we develop a connection between association queries and formal concept analysis. An association query discovers dependencies among values of an attribute grouped by other, non-primary attributes in a given relation. Formal concept analysis deals with formal mathematical tools and techniques to develop and analyze relationship between concepts and to develop concept structures. We show that dependencies found by an association query can be derived from a concept structure. Keywords- Association queries, formal concept analysis, dependency relations, concept structures. 1 Introduction An association query discovers dependencies among values of an attribute grouped by some other attributes in a given relation. A specific case of discovering associations concerns with a concrete problem that focuses on the analysis of market-basket-data (or, simply, basket relation) and in the end the solution of market-basket problem helps a retail store to learn about its customers' purc..