FPrep: Fuzzy clustering driven efficient automated pre-processing for fuzzy association rule mining

Conventional Association Rule Mining (ARM) algorithms usually deal with datasets with binary values, and expect any numerical values to be converted to binary ones using sharp partitions, like Age = 25 to 60. In order to mitigate this constraint, Fuzzy logic is used to convert quantitative values of attributes to binary ones, so as to eliminate any loss of information arising due to sharp partitioning, especially at partition boundaries, and then generate fuzzy association rules. But, before any fuzzy ARM algorithm can be used, the original dataset (with crisp attributes) needs to be transformed into a form with fuzzy attributes. This paper describes a methodology, called FPrep, to do this pre-processing, which first involves using fuzzy clustering to generate fuzzy partitions, and then uses these partitions to get a fuzzy version (with fuzzy records) of the original dataset. Ultimately, the fuzzy data (fuzzy records) are represented in a standard manner such that they can be used as input to any kind of fuzzy ARM algorithm, irrespective of how it works and processes fuzzy data. We also show that FPrep is much faster than other such comparable transformation techniques, which in turn depend on non-fuzzy techniques, like hard clustering (CLARANS and CURE). Moreover, we illustrate the quality of the fuzzy partitions generated using FPrep, and the number of frequent itemsets generated by a fuzzy ARM algorithm when preceded by FPrep.