Multitask-based association rule mining

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in association rule mining (ARM) in various fields. However,standard ARM algorithms fail to discover rules for multitask problems as they do not consider task-oriented investigationand, therefore, they ignore the correlation among the tasks. Considering this situation, this paper proposes a novelalgorithm, named multitask association rule miner (MTARM), that tends to jointly discover rules by considering multipletasks. This paper also introduces two novel concepts: single-task rule and multiple-task rule. In the first phase of theproposed approach, highly frequent local rules (single-task rules) are explored for each task separately and then theselocal rules are combined to produce the global result (multitask rules) using a majority voting mechanism. Experimentswere conducted on four different real-world multitask learning datasets. The experimental results indicated that theproposed MTARM approach discovers more information than that of traditional ARM algorithms by jointly consideringthe relationships among multiple tasks.