Association Rule Mining as a Data Mining Technique

Association rule mining represents a data mining technique and its goal is to find interesting association or correlation relationships among a large set of data items. With massive amounts of data continuously being collected and stored in databases, many companies are becoming interested in mining association rules from their databases to increase their profits. For example, the discovery of interesting association relationships among huge amounts of business transaction records can help catalog design, crossmarketing, loss leader analysis, and other business decision making processes. A typical example of association rule mining is market basket analysis. This process analyzes customer buying habits by finding associations between the different items that customers place in their “shopping baskets.