arules --- Mining Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets with R

The arules package for R provides the infrastructure for representing, manipulating and analyzing transaction data and patterns (frequent itemsets and association rules). Also provides interfaces to C implementations of the association mining algorithms Apriori and Eclat.

arules core packages:

• arules: arules base package with data structures, mining algorithms (APRIORI and ECLAT), interest measures.
• arulesViz: Visualization of association rules.
• arulesCBA: Classification algorithms based on association rules (includes CBA).
• arulesSequences: Mining frequent sequences (cSPADE).

Other related packages:

Additional mining algorithms

• arulesNBMiner: Mining NB-frequent itemsets and NB-precise rules.
• opusminer: OPUS Miner algorithm for filtered top-k association discovery.
• RKEEL: Interface to KEEL's association rule mining algorithm.
• RSarules: Mining algorithm which randomly samples association rules with one pre-chosen item as the consequent from a transaction dataset.

In-database analytics

• ibmdbR: IBM in-database analytics for R can calculate association rules from a database table.
• rfml: Mine frequent itemsets or association rules using a MarkLogic server.

Interface

• rattle: Provides a graphical user interface for association rule mining.
• pmml: Generates PMML (predictive model markup language) for association rules.

Classification

• arc: Alternative CBA implementation.
• rCBA: Alternative CBA implementation.
• sblr: Scalable Bayesian rule lists algorithm for classification.

Recommendation/Prediction

• recommenerlab: Supports creating predictions using association rules.

Installation

Stable CRAN version: install from within R with

install.packages("arules")

Current development version: Download package from AppVeyor or install from GitHub (needs devtools).

library("devtools")
install_github("mhahsler/arules")

Usage

Load package and mine some association rules.

library("arules")
data("Adult")

rules <- apriori(Adult, parameter = list(supp = 0.5, conf = 0.9, target = "rules"))

Parameter specification:
 confidence minval smax arem  aval originalSupport support minlen maxlen target   ext
        0.9    0.1    1 none FALSE            TRUE     0.5      1     10  rules FALSE

Algorithmic control:
 filter tree heap memopt load sort verbose
    0.1 TRUE TRUE  FALSE TRUE    2    TRUE

Absolute minimum support count: 24421 

apriori - find association rules with the apriori algorithm
version 4.21 (2004.05.09)        (c) 1996-2004   Christian Borgelt
set item appearances ...[0 item(s)] done [0.00s].
set transactions ...[115 item(s), 48842 transaction(s)] done [0.03s].
sorting and recoding items ... [9 item(s)] done [0.00s].
creating transaction tree ... done [0.03s].
checking subsets of size 1 2 3 4 done [0.00s].
writing ... [52 rule(s)] done [0.00s].
creating S4 object  ... done [0.01s].

Show basic statistics.

summary(rules)

set of 52 rules

rule length distribution (lhs + rhs):sizes
 1  2  3  4 
 2 13 24 13 

   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
  1.000   2.000   3.000   2.923   3.250   4.000 

summary of quality measures:
    support         confidence          lift            count      
 Min.   :0.5084   Min.   :0.9031   Min.   :0.9844   Min.   :24832  
 1st Qu.:0.5415   1st Qu.:0.9155   1st Qu.:0.9937   1st Qu.:26447  
 Median :0.5974   Median :0.9229   Median :0.9997   Median :29178  
 Mean   :0.6436   Mean   :0.9308   Mean   :1.0036   Mean   :31433  
 3rd Qu.:0.7426   3rd Qu.:0.9494   3rd Qu.:1.0057   3rd Qu.:36269  
 Max.   :0.9533   Max.   :0.9583   Max.   :1.0586   Max.   :46560  

mining info:
  data ntransactions support confidence
 Adult         48842     0.5        0.9

Inspect rules with the highest lift.

inspect(head(rules, by = "lift"))

    lhs                               rhs                              support confidence     lift
[1] {sex=Male,                                                                                    
     native-country=United-States} => {race=White}                   0.5415421  0.9051090 1.058554
[2] {sex=Male,                                                                                    
     capital-loss=None,                                                                           
     native-country=United-States} => {race=White}                   0.5113632  0.9032585 1.056390
[3] {race=White}                   => {native-country=United-States} 0.7881127  0.9217231 1.027076
[4] {race=White,                                                                                  
     capital-loss=None}            => {native-country=United-States} 0.7490480  0.9205626 1.025783
[5] {race=White,                                                                                  
     sex=Male}                     => {native-country=United-States} 0.5415421  0.9204803 1.025691
[6] {race=White,                                                                                  
     capital-gain=None}            => {native-country=United-States} 0.7194628  0.9202807 1.025469

References

• Intro article with examples by Michael Hahsler, Bettina Grün, Kurt Hornik and

Christian Buchta.

• Michael Hahsler, Bettina Grün and Kurt Hornik, arules - A Computational Environment for Mining Association Rules and Frequent Item Sets. Journal of Statistical Software, 14(15), 2005.
• Michael Hahsler, Sudheer Chelluboina, Kurt Hornik, and Christian Buchta. The arules R-package ecosystem: Analyzing interesting patterns from large transaction datasets. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12:1977-1981, 2011.
• Hahsler, Michael (2015).

A Probabilistic Comparison of Commonly Used Interest Measures for Association Rules, 2015, URL: http://michael.hahsler.net/research/association_rules/measures.html.