R package arules - Mining Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets

License

Introduction

The arules package family for R provides the infrastructure for representing, manipulating and analyzing transaction data and patterns using frequent itemsets and association rules. The package also provides a wide range of interest measures and mining algorithms including the code of Christian Borgelt’s popular and efficient C implementations of the association mining algorithms Apriori and Eclat. In addition, the following mining algorithms are available via fim4r:

Apriori
Eclat
Carpenter
FPgrowth
IsTa
RElim
SaM

Code examples can be found in Chapter 5 of the web book R Companion for Introduction to Data Mining.

To cite package ‘arules’ in publications use:

Hahsler M, Gruen B, Hornik K (2005). “arules - A Computational Environment for Mining Association Rules and Frequent Item Sets.” Journal of Statistical Software, 14(15), 1-25. ISSN 1548-7660, doi:10.18637/jss.v014.i15 https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v014.i15.

@Article{,
  title = {arules -- {A} Computational Environment for Mining Association Rules and Frequent Item Sets},
  author = {Michael Hahsler and Bettina Gruen and Kurt Hornik},
  year = {2005},
  journal = {Journal of Statistical Software},
  volume = {14},
  number = {15},
  pages = {1--25},
  doi = {10.18637/jss.v014.i15},
  month = {October},
  issn = {1548-7660},
}

Packages

arules core packages

arules: arules base package with data structures, mining algorithms (APRIORI and ECLAT), interest measures.
arulesViz: Visualization of association rules.
arulesCBA: Classification algorithms based on association rules (includes CBA).
arulesSequences: Mining frequent sequences (cSPADE).

Additional mining algorithms

arulesNBMiner: Mining NB-frequent itemsets and NB-precise rules.
fim4r: Provides fast implementations for several mining algorithms. An interface function called fim4r() is provided in arules.
opusminer: OPUS Miner algorithm for finding the op k productive, non-redundant itemsets. Call opus() with format = 'itemsets'.
RKEEL: Interface to KEEL’s association rule mining algorithm.
RSarules: Mining algorithm which randomly samples association rules with one pre-chosen item as the consequent from a transaction dataset.

In-database analytics

ibmdbR: IBM in-database analytics for R can calculate association rules from a database table.
rfml: Mine frequent itemsets or association rules using a MarkLogic server.

Interface

rattle: Provides a graphical user interface for association rule mining.
pmml: Generates PMML (predictive model markup language) for association rules.

Classification

arc: Alternative CBA implementation.
inTrees: Interpret Tree Ensembles provides functions for: extracting, measuring and pruning rules; selecting a compact rule set; summarizing rules into a learner.
rCBA: Alternative CBA implementation.
qCBA: Quantitative Classification by Association Rules.
sblr: Scalable Bayesian rule lists algorithm for classification.

Outlier Detection

fpmoutliers: Frequent Pattern Mining Outliers.

Recommendation/Prediction

recommenerlab: Supports creating predictions using association rules.

The following R packages use arules: arc, arlclustering, arulesCBA, arulesNBMiner, arulesSequences, arulesViz, clickstream, CLONETv2, CRE, ctsem, discnorm, fcaR, fdm2id, GroupBN, ibmdbR, inTrees, nuggets, opusminer, pervasive, pmml, qCBA, RareComb, rattle, rCBA, recommenderlab, rgnoisefilt, RKEEL, RulesTools, sbrl, SurvivalTests, TELP

Installation

Stable CRAN version: Install from within R with

install.packages("arules")

Current development version: Install from r-universe.

install.packages("arules",
    repos = c("https://mhahsler.r-universe.dev",
              "https://cloud.r-project.org/"))

Usage

Load package and mine some association rules.

library("arules")
data("IncomeESL")

trans <- transactions(IncomeESL)
trans

## transactions in sparse format with
##  8993 transactions (rows) and
##  84 items (columns)

rules <- apriori(trans, supp = 0.1, conf = 0.9, target = "rules")

## Apriori
## 
## Parameter specification:
##  confidence minval smax arem  aval originalSupport maxtime support minlen
##         0.9    0.1    1 none FALSE            TRUE       5     0.1      1
##  maxlen target  ext
##      10  rules TRUE
## 
## Algorithmic control:
##  filter tree heap memopt load sort verbose
##     0.1 TRUE TRUE  FALSE TRUE    2    TRUE
## 
## Absolute minimum support count: 899 
## 
## set item appearances ...[0 item(s)] done [0.00s].
## set transactions ...[84 item(s), 8993 transaction(s)] done [0.01s].
## sorting and recoding items ... [42 item(s)] done [0.00s].
## creating transaction tree ... done [0.01s].
## checking subsets of size 1 2 3 4 5 6 done [0.03s].
## writing ... [457 rule(s)] done [0.00s].
## creating S4 object  ... done [0.00s].

Inspect the rules with the highest lift.

inspect(head(rules, n = 3, by = "lift"))

##     lhs                           rhs                      support confidence coverage lift count
## [1] {dual incomes=no,                                                                            
##      householder status=own}   => {marital status=married}    0.10       0.97     0.10  2.6   914
## [2] {years in bay area=>10,                                                                      
##      dual incomes=yes,                                                                           
##      type of home=house}       => {marital status=married}    0.10       0.96     0.10  2.6   902
## [3] {dual incomes=yes,                                                                           
##      householder status=own,                                                                     
##      type of home=house,                                                                         
##      language in home=english} => {marital status=married}    0.11       0.96     0.11  2.6   988

Using arules with tidyverse

arules works seamlessly with tidyverse. For example:

dplyr can be used for cleaning and preparing the transactions.
transaction() and other functions accept tibble as input.
Functions in arules can be connected with the pipe operator |>.
arulesViz provides visualizations based on ggplot2.

For example, we can remove the ethnic information column before creating transactions and then mine and inspect rules.

library("tidyverse")
library("arules")
data("IncomeESL")

trans <- IncomeESL |>
    select(-`ethnic classification`) |>
    transactions()
rules <- trans |>
    apriori(supp = 0.1, conf = 0.9, target = "rules", control = list(verbose = FALSE))
rules |>
    head(3, by = "lift") |>
    as("data.frame") |>
    tibble()

## # A tibble: 3 × 6
##   rules                                  support confidence coverage  lift count
##   <chr>                                    <dbl>      <dbl>    <dbl> <dbl> <int>
## 1 {dual incomes=no,householder status=o…   0.102      0.971    0.105  2.62   914
## 2 {years in bay area=>10,dual incomes=y…   0.100      0.961    0.104  2.59   902
## 3 {dual incomes=yes,householder status=…   0.110      0.960    0.114  2.59   988