An improved approach to find membership functions and multiple minimum supports in fuzzy data mining

  • Authors:

  • Chun-Hao Chen;Tzung-Pei Hong;Vincent S. Tseng

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan, ROC;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National University of Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung 811, Taiwan, ROC and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen Un ...;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan, ROC

  • Venue:
  • Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 12.06

Visualization

Abstract

Fuzzy mining approaches have recently been discussed for deriving fuzzy knowledge. Since items may have their own characteristics, different minimum supports and membership functions may be specified for different items. In the past, we proposed a genetic-fuzzy data-mining algorithm for extracting minimum supports and membership functions for items from quantitative transactions. In that paper, minimum supports and membership functions of all items are encoded in a chromosome such that it may be not easy to converge. In this paper, an enhanced approach is proposed, which processes the items in a divide-and-conquer strategy. The approach is called divide-and-conquer genetic-fuzzy mining algorithm for items with Multiple Minimum Supports (DGFMMS), and is designed for finding minimum supports, membership functions, and fuzzy association rules. Possible solutions are evaluated by their requirement satisfaction divided by their suitability of derived membership functions. The proposed GA framework maintains multiple populations, each for one item's minimum support and membership functions. The final best minimum supports and membership functions in all the populations are then gathered together to be used for mining fuzzy association rules. Experimental results also show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.