Machine Learning with R - Second Edition

Summary

Association rules are frequently used to find provide useful insights in the massive transaction databases of large retailers. As an unsupervised learning process, association rule learners are capable of extracting knowledge from large databases without any prior knowledge of what patterns to seek. The catch is that it takes some effort to reduce the wealth of information into a smaller and more manageable set of results. The Apriori algorithm, which we studied in this chapter, does so by setting minimum thresholds of interestingness, and reporting only the associations meeting these criteria.

We put the Apriori algorithm to work while performing a market basket analysis for a month's worth of transactions at a moderately sized supermarket. ...