A transaction-based neighbourhood-driven approach to quantifying interestingness of association rules

In this paper, we present a data-driven approach for ranking association rules (ARs) based on interestingness. The occurrence of unrelated or weakly related item-pairs in an AR is interesting. In the retail market-basket context, items may be related through various relationships arising due to mutual interaction, ´substitutability´ and ´complementarity.´ Item-relatedness is a composite of these relationships. We introduce three relatedness measures for capturing relatedness between item-pairs. These measures use the concept of junction embedding to appropriately weigh the relatedness contributions due to complementarity and substitutability between items. We propose an interestingness coefficient by combining the three relatedness measures. We compare this with two objective measures of interestingness and show the intuitiveness of the proposed interestingness coefficient.