Comparative Analysis of Association Rule Mining Algorithms in Market Basket Analysis Using Transactional Data

Association rule mining (ARM) is an aspect of data mining that has revolutionized the area of predictive modelling paving way for data mining technique to become the recommended method for business owners to evaluate organizational performance. Market basket analysis (MBA), a useful modeling technique in data mining, is often used to analyze customer buying pattern. Choosing the right ARM algorithm to use in MBA is somewhat difficult, as most algorithms performance is determined by characteristics such as amount of data used, application domain, time variation, and customer’s preferences. Hence this study examines four ARM algorithm used in MBA systems for improved business Decisions. One million, one hundered and twele thousand (1,112,000) transactional data were extracted from Babcock University Superstore. The dataset was induced with Frequent Pattern Growth, Apiori, Association Outliers and Supervised Association Rule ARM algorithms. The outputs were compared using minimum support threshold, confidence level and execution time as metrics. The result showed that The FP Growth has minimum support threshold of 0.011 and confidence level of 0.013, Apriori 0.019 and 0.022, Association outliers 0.026 and 0.294 while Supervised Association Rule has 0.032 and 0.212 respectively. The FP Growth and Apirori ARM algorithms performed better than Association Outliers and Supervised Association Rule when the minimum support and confidence threshold were both set to 0.1. The study concluded by recommending a hybrid ARM algorithm to be used for building MBA Applications. The outcome of this study when adopted by business ventures will lead to improved business decisions thereby helping to achieve customer retention. Keywords: Association rule mining, Business ventures, Data mining, Market basket analysis, Transactional data