Differential evolution and sine cosine algorithm based novel hybrid multi-objective approaches for numerical association rule mining

In association rules mining from data that have numeric-valued attributes, automatically adjusting the attribute intervals at the time of the mining process without a preprocess is very critical for preventing data loss and attribute interactions. In this paper, differential evolution and sine cosine algorithm based novel hybrid multi-objective evolutionary optimization methods are proposed for rapidly and directly mining the reduced high-quality numerical association rules by simultaneously adjusting the relevant intervals of related attributes without finding the frequent itemsets. These algorithms perform a global search and find the high-quality rules set in only one execution by modeling the rule mining task as a multi-objective problem that simultaneously meets different conflicting metrics. The algorithms proposed in this paper ensure the discovered rules to have high confidence and support and to be comprehensible. The proposed methods automate the rule mining process by directly finding the minimum intervals for the attributes and eliminating the need for minimum confidence and minimum support determined beforehand for each data set. The performances of new algorithms proposed in this study were tested with those of the state-of-the-art algorithms. The results show superiority of the proposed methods on the data sets that contain fewer attributes and higher number of instances. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.