Evolving temporal fuzzy itemsets from quantitative data with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

We present a novel method for mining itemsets that are both quantitative and temporal, for association rule mining, using multi-objective evolutionary search and optimisation. This method successfully identifies temporal itemsets that occur more frequently in areas of a dataset with specific quantitative values represented with fuzzy sets. Current approaches preprocess data which can often lead to a loss of information. The novelty of this research lies in exploring the composition of quantitative and temporal fuzzy itemsets and the approach of using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. This preliminary work presents the problem, a novel approach and promising results that will lead to future work. Results show the ability of NSGA-II to evolve target itemsets that have been augmented into synthetic datasets. Itemsets with different levels of support have been augmented to demonstrate this approach with varying difficulties.