A hierarchical heterogeneous ant colony optimization based approach for efficient action rule mining

Most data mining algorithms aim at discovering customer models and classification of customer profiles. Application of these data mining techniques to industrial problems such as customer relationship management helps in classification of customers with respect to their status. The mined information does not suggest any action that would result in reclassification of customer profile. Such actions would be useful to maximize the objective function, for instance, the net profit or minimizing the cost. These actions provide hints to a business user regarding the attributes that have to be changed to reclassify the customers from an undesirable class (e.g. disloyal) to the desired class (e.g. loyal). This paper proposes a novel algorithm called Hierarchical Heterogeneous Ant Colony Optimization based Action Rule Mining (HHACOARM) algorithm to generate action rules. The algorithm has been developed considering the resource constraints. The algorithm has ant agents at different levels in the hierarchy to identify the flexible attributes whose values need to be changed to mine action rules. The advantage of HHACOARM algorithm is that it generates optimal number of minimal cost action rules. HHACOARM algorithm does not generate invalid rules. Also, the computational complexity of HHACOARM algorithm is less compared to the existing action rule mining methods. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.