Contrasting the Contrast Sets: An Alternative Approach

The need to identify significant differences between contrasting groups or classes is ubiquitous and thus was the focus of many statisticians and data miners. Contrast sets, conjunctions of attribute-value pairs significantly more frequent in one group than another, were proposed to describe such differences, which lead to the introduction of a new data mining technique - contrast-set mining. A number of attempts have been made in this regard by various authors; however, no clear picture seems to have emerged. In this paper, we try to address the problem of finding meaningful contrast sets by using association rule based analysis. We present the results for our experiments for interesting contrast sets and compare these results with those obtained from the well-known algorithm for contrast sets-STUCCO.