• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.97-111
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• 2008

Commercial data mining tools basically support binary attributes only in mining association rules, that is, they can mine binary association rules only. In general, however. transaction databases contain not only binary attributes but also quantitative attributes. Thus, in this paper we propose a systematic approach to mine quantitative association rules---association rules which contain quantitative attributes---using commercial mining tools. To achieve this goal, we first propose an overall working framework that mines quantitative association rules based on commercial mining tools. The proposed framework consists of two steps: 1) a pre-processing step which converts quantitative attributes into binary attributes and 2) a post-processing step which reconverts binary association rules into quantitative association rules. As the pre-processing step, we present the concept of domain partition, and based on the domain partition, we formally redefine the previous bipartition and multi-partition techniques, which are mean-based or median-based techniques for bipartition, and are equi-width or equi-depth techniques for multi-partition. These previous partition techniques, however, have the problem of not considering distribution characteristics of attribute values. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose an intuitive partition technique, named standard deviation minimization. In our standard deviation minimization, adjacent attributes are included in the same partition if the change of their standard deviations is small, but they are divided into different partitions if the change is large. We also propose the post-processing step that integrates binary association rules and reconverts them into the corresponding quantitative rules. Through extensive experiments, we argue that our framework works correctly, and we show that our standard deviation minimization is superior to other partition techniques. According to these results, we believe that our framework is practically applicable for naive users to mine quantitative association rules using commercial data mining tools.