Screening and interpreting multi-item associations based on log-linear modeling

Association rules have received a lot of attention in the data mining community since their introduction. The classical approach to find rules whose items enjoy high support (appear in a lot of the transactions in the data set) is, however, filled with shortcomings. It has been shown that support can be misleading as an indicator of how interesting the rule is. Alternative measures, such as lift, have been proposed. More recently, a paper by DuMouchel et al. proposed the use of all-two-factor loglinear models to discover sets of items that cannot be explained by pairwise associations between the items involved. This approach, however, has its limitations, since it stops short of considering higher order interactions (other than pairwise) among the items. In this paper, we propose a method that examines the parameters of the fitted loglinear models to find all the significant association patterns among the items. Since fitting loglinear models for large data sets can be computationally prohibitive, we apply graph-theoretical results to divide the original set of items into components (sets of items) that are statistically independent from each other. We then apply loglinear modeling to each of the components and find the interesting associations among items in them. The technique is experimentally evaluated with a real data set (insurance data) and a series of synthetic data sets. The results show that the technique is effective in finding interesting associations among the items involved.