Probabilistic and reinforced mining of association rules
This work addresses the problem of enhancing association rule mining for applications like retail, finance, and medical diagnostics by offering uncertainty-aware and adaptive frameworks, though it is incremental in combining existing probabilistic and reinforcement techniques.
The paper tackles association rule mining by introducing four novel probabilistic and reinforcement-driven methods that depart from traditional frequency-based algorithms, resulting in improved flexibility and robustness for discovering rare or complex patterns, particularly on small datasets, with empirical validation on synthetic and real-world data.
This work introduces 4 novel probabilistic and reinforcement-driven methods for association rule mining (ARM): Gaussian process-based association rule mining (GPAR), Bayesian ARM (BARM), multi-armed bandit based ARM (MAB-ARM), and reinforcement learning based association rule mining (RLAR). These methods depart fundamentally from traditional frequency-based algorithms such as Apriori, FP-Growth, and Eclat, offering enhanced capabilities for incorporating prior knowledge, modeling uncertainty, item dependencies, probabilistic inference and adaptive search strategies. GPAR employs Gaussian processes to model item co-occurrence via feature representations, enabling principled inference, uncertainty quantification, and efficient generalization to unseen itemsets without retraining. BARM adopts a Bayesian framework with priors and optional correlation structures, yielding robust uncertainty quantification through full posterior distributions over item presence probabilities. MAB-ARM, including its Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) companion, utilizes an upper confidence bound (UCB) strategy for efficient and adaptive exploration of the itemset space, while RLAR applies a deep Q-network (DQN) to learn a generalizable policy for identifying high-quality rules. Collectively, these approaches improve the flexibility and robustness of ARM, particularly for discovering rare or complex patterns and operating on small datasets. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate their effectiveness, while also highlighting trade-offs in computational complexity and interpretability. These innovations mark a significant shift from static, frequency-driven paradigms, offering some prior and dependency-informed, uncertainty-aware or scalable ARM frameworks for diverse application domains such as retail, geography, finance, medical diagnostics, and risk-sensitive scenarios.