Comparative Association Rules Mining Using Genetic Network Programming (GNP) with Attributes Accumulation Mechanism and its Application to Traffic Systems

Among several methods of extracting association rules that have been reported, a new evolutionary method named Genetic Network Programming (GNP) has also shown its effectiveness for dense databases. However, the conventional GNP data mining method can not find comparative relations and hidden patterns among a large amount of data. In this paper, we present a method of comparative association rules mining using Genetic Network Programming (GNP) with attributes accumulation mechanism in order to uncover comparative association rules between different datasets. GNP is an evolutionary approach recently developed, which can evolve itself and find the optimal solutions. The objective of the comparative association rules mining is to check two or more databases instead of one, so as to find the hidden relations among them. The proposed method measures the importance of association rules by using the absolute values of the confidence differences of the rules obtained from different databases and can get a number of interesting rules. Association rules obtained by comparison can help us to find and analyze the explicit and implicit patterns among a large amount of data. On the other hand, the calculation is very time-consuming, when the conventional GNP based data mining is used for the large attributes case. So, we have proposed an attributes accumulation mechanism to improve the performances. Then, the comparative association rules mining using GNP has been applied to a complicated traffic system. By mining and analyzing the rules under different traffic situations, it was found that we can get interesting information of the traffic system.