Evaluation of Hierarchical Interestingness Measures for Mining Pairwise Generalized Association Rules

In the literature about association analysis, many interestingness measures have been proposed to assess the quality of obtained association rules in order to select a small set of the most interesting among them. In the particular case of hierarchically organized items and generalized association rules connecting them, a measure that dealt appropriately with the hierarchy would be advantageous. Here we present the further developments of a new class of such hierarchical interestingness measures and compare them with a large set of conventional measures and with three hierarchical pruning methods from the literature. The aim is to find interesting pairwise generalized association rules connecting the concepts of multiple ontologies. Interested in the broad empirical evaluation of interestingness measures, we compared the rules obtained by 37 methods on four real world data sets against predefined ground truth sets of associations. To this end, we adopted a framework of instance-based ontology matching and extended the set of performance measures by two novel measures: relation learning recall and precision which take into account hierarchical relationships.