A note on “A new method for ranking discovered rules from data mining by DEA”, and a full ranking approach

In a recent paper by Toloo et al. [Toloo, M., Sohrabi, B., & Nalchigar, S. (2009). A new method for ranking discovered rules from data mining by DEA. Expert Systems with Applications, 36, 8503–8508], they proposed a new integrated data envelopment analysis model to find most efficient association rule in data mining. Then, utilizing this model, an algorithm is developed for ranking association rules by considering multiple criteria. In this paper, we show that their model only selects one efficient association rule by chance and is totally depended on the solution method or software is used for solving the problem. In addition, it is shown that their proposed algorithm can only rank efficient rules randomly and will fail to rank inefficient DMUs. We also refer to some other drawbacks in that paper and propose another approach to set up a full ranking of the association rules. A numerical example illustrates some contents of the paper.

► We refer to some drawbacks in a recent paper for ranking DMUs in data mining.
► The existing model ranks efficient DMUs randomly and fails to rank inefficient DMUs.
► An approach is proposed to set up a full ranking of the association rules.
► An algorithm is developed to obtain efficient DMUs and improve the models.