Optimizing Membership Functions using Learning Automata for Fuzzy Association Rule Mining

The Transactions in web data often consist of quantitative data, suggesting that fuzzy set theory can be used to represent such data. The time spent by users on each web page is one type of web data, was regarded as a trapezoidal membership function (TMF) and can be used to evaluate user browsing behavior. The quality of mining fuzzy association rules depends on membership functions and since the membership functions of each web page are different from those of other web pages, so automatic finding the number and position of TMF is significant. In this paper, a different reinforcement-based optimization approach called LA-OMF was proposed to find both the number and positions of TMFs for fuzzy association rules. In the proposed algorithm, the centers and spreads of TMFs were considered as parameters of the search space, and a new representation using learning automata (LA) was proposed to optimize these parameters. The performance of the proposed approach was evaluated and the results were compared with the results of other algorithms on a real dataset. Experiments on datasets with different sizes confirmed that the proposed LA-OMF improved the efficiency of mining fuzzy association rules by extracting optimized membership functions.