SCR-Apriori for Mining ‘Sets of Contrasting Rules’

In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for mining novel ‘Set of Contrasting Rules’-pattern (SCR-pattern), which consists of several association rules. This pattern is of high interest due to the guaranteed quality of the rules forming it and its ability to discover useful knowledge. However, SCR-pattern has no efficient mining algorithm. We propose SCR-Apriori algorithm, which results in the same set of SCR-patterns as the state-of-the-art approach, but is less computationally expensive. We also show experimentally that by incorporating the knowledge about the pattern structure into Apriori algorithm, SCR-Apriori can significantly prune the search space of frequent itemsets to be analysed.