CHAPTER 9

Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining is a popular, unsupervised learning technique, used in business to help identify shopping patterns. It is also known as market basket analysis. It helps find interesting relationships (affinities) between variables (items or events). Thus, it can help cross-sell related items and increase the size of a sale.

All data used in this technique is categorical. There is no dependent variable. It uses machine-learning algorithms. The fascinating “relationship between sales of diapers and beers” is how it is often explained in popular literature. This technique accepts as input the raw point-of-sale transaction data. The output produced is the description of the most frequent affinities among ...

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