Abstract
•Detailed insight into soft set based association rule mining is provided.•Drawbacks of some existing definitions are pointed out and rectified.•New concepts and algorithms for soft association rule mining are developed.•Essentials of new concepts and algorithms are highlighted by two case studies.
Association rules, one of the most useful constructs in data mining, can be exerted to capture interesting dependencies between variables in large datasets. Herawan and Deris initiated the investigation of mining association rules from transactional datasets using soft set theory. Unfortunately, some existing concepts in the literature were unable to realize properly Herawan and Deris’s initial idea. This paper aims to offer further detailed insights into soft set based association rule mining. With regard to regular association rule mining using soft sets, we refine several existing concepts to improve the generality and clarity of former definitions. Regarding maximal association rule mining based on soft sets, we point out the drawbacks of some existing definitions and offer some way to rectify the problem. A number of new notions, such as transactional data soft sets, parameter-taxonomic soft sets, parameter cosets, realizations and M-realizations of parameter sets are proposed to facilitate soft set based association rule mining. Several algorithms are designed to find M-realizations of parameter sets or extract σ-M-strong and γ-M-reliable maximal association rules in parameter-taxonomic soft sets. We also present an example to illustrate potential applications of our method in clinical diagnosis. Moreover, two case studies are conducted to highlight the essentials of soft set based association rule mining approach.