Mining fuzzy association rules with weighted items

In most models of mining fuzzy association rules, the items are considered to have equal importance. Due to diverse human interest and preference for items, such models do not work well in many situations. To improve such models, we propose a method to mine fuzzy association rules with weighted items. One of the major problems in data mining research is the development of good measures of interest of discovered rules. The weighted support and weighted confidence for fuzzy association rules are defined. Kohonen self-organized mapping is used to fuzzify the numerical attributes into linguistic terms. A new fuzzy association rule mining algorithm, which generalizes the popular Apriori Gen large itemset based algorithm, is developed. The advantages of the new algorithm are shown by testing it on a census database with 5000 transaction records