Practical Applications of Data Mining

38 Chapter 2 assoCiation rules

From a logical viewpoint, each tuple in a relation is a logical expression

in conjunctive terms. Similarly, a data relation may be characterized by a

large set of disjunctions of such conjunctive terms. Users may specify the

preferred generalization threshold, that is, the maximum number of disjuncts

of the resulting expression. For example, if the threshold value is 5, the final

generalized rule will consist of at most five disjuncts. The generalization

threshold controls the complexity of the rule. A large threshold value may

lead to a complex rule with many disjuncts, whereas a small threshold v ...