Applying cluster-based fuzzy association rules mining framework into EC environment

During electronic commerce (EC) environment, how to effectively mine the useful transaction information will be an important issue to be addressed in designing the marketing strategy for most enterprises. Especially, the relationships between different databases (e.g., the transaction and online browsing database) may have the unknown and potential knowledge of business intelligence. Two important issues of mining association rules were mentioned to address EC application in this study. The first issue is the discovery of generalized fuzzy association rules in the transaction database. The second issue is to discover association rules from the web usage data and the large itemsets identified in the transaction database. A cluster-based fuzzy association rules (CBFAR) mining architecture is then proposed to simultaneously address such two issues in this study. Three contributions were achieved as: (a) an efficient fuzzy association rule miner based on cluster-based fuzzy-sets tables is presented to identify all the large fuzzy itemsets; (b) this approach requires less contrast to generate large itemsets; (3) a fuzzy rule mining approach is used to compute the confidence values for discovering the relationships between transaction database and browsing information database. Finally, a simulated example during EC environment is provided to demonstrate the rationality and feasibility of the proposed approach.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slideHighlights► A cluster-based method is proposed to mine generalized fuzzy association rules during the EC environment. ► It outperforms a known apriori-based mining algorithm for a foodmart transaction database example. ► The associative features among the click frequency of product's web and the transaction records can also be mined. ► The multiple-level association knowledge can be mined to aid decision-making of business strategies.