Learning Data Mining with Python - Second Edition

Ranking to find the best rules

Now that we can compute the support and confidence of all rules, we want to be able to find the best rules. To do this, we perform a ranking and print the ones with the highest values. We can do this for both the support and confidence values.

To find the rules with the highest support, we first sort the support dictionary. Dictionaries do not support ordering by default; the items() function gives us a list containing the data in the dictionary. We can sort this list using the itemgetter class as our key, which allows for the sorting of nested lists such as this one. Using itemgetter(1) allows us to sort based on the values. Setting reverse=True gives us the highest values first:

 from operator import itemgetter ...