Interpretation of association rules in multi-tier structures

• It uses multi-tier structure to interpret association rules in terms of granules.
• It proposes association mappings for the construction of multi-tier structure.
• It presents a method to interpret granules in terms of patterns.
• It indicates that small closed patterns can be interpreted as small granules.
• It proves that decision rules and max closed patterns are mutually corresponding.

Dealing with the large amount of data resulting from association rule mining is a big challenge. The essential issue is how to provide efficient methods for summarizing and representing meaningful discovered knowledge from databases. This paper presents a new approach called multi-tier granule mining to improve the performance of association rule mining. Rather than using patterns, it uses granules to represent knowledge that is implicitly contained in relational databases. This approach also uses multi-tier structures and association mappings to interpret association rules in terms of granules. Consequently, association rules can be quickly assessed and meaningless association rules can be justified according to these association mappings. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is promising.