Machine Learning in Java - Second Edition

Database of transactions

In association rule mining, the dataset is structured a bit differently than the approach presented in the first chapter. First, there is no class value, as this is not required for learning association rules. Next, the dataset is presented as a transactional table, where each supermarket item corresponds to a binary attribute. Hence, the feature vector could be extremely large.

Consider the following example. Suppose we have four receipts, as shown next. Each receipt corresponds to a purchasing transaction:

To write these receipts in the form of a transactional database, we first identify all of the possible items ...